From the beginning
by Trynyta
Summary: Éléanore was not meant to be a survivor, but the Commonwealth is an uncompromising teacher. Her adventures to find her son and live to tell the story started the minute she set foot on Vault 111's platform. Through hardship and friendship, confrontation and federation, will she manage to tame this new world before it devours her?
1. Le vent nous portera

She wiped the blood out of her face. A victorious smirk was pursing her lips as she kneeled down and ripped the 10mm gun from the Triggerman's hand, and emptied it from its ammo. This mission was going to be a nice source of caps once all the weapons she gathered would be sold to K-L-E-O, on top of the reward Charlie now owed her. After the three warehouses, her bag was becoming pretty heavy for her to carry, so she popped a Buffout pill.

"A little pick-me-up, heh?"

"Don't worry, mum, I'll be careful," she replied to her companion, sticking her tongue out. "At least Dogmeat doesn't judge me."

"You could rip this mutt's tail off with your bare hands, it would still follow you to the bowels of Hell and back, " the young man said while patting the dog on the head.

She put on a falsely outraged look on her face, her hand resting dramatically on her chest.

"You would accuse me of such sadistic behavior, furthermore towards this poor canine soul? Who do you think I am? I couldn't hurt a fly..."

"You tell that to this guy at your feet, then..."

"This has nothing to do with it. He surprised me, and I got a bit carried away. Not my fault my hunting knife reacts faster than my brain. And anyway, if you want us to get those caps, he needed to go, so... Unless you're no interested in the money anymore?"

Her companion punched her lightly on the shoulder, and they headed out of the warehouse. She had a few bruises and scratches, but nothing too serious. Not like she had a flawless skin to preserve anymore anyway, and the caps that she would win at the end were worth it. She and her friends badly needed them.

* * *

Her morning had started particularly well. She had kissed her husband, still asleep in their bed, and went to the bathroom to get prepared. She'd taken a long, hot shower; anointed her scalp with the serum that made her unremarkable brown hair at least a bit shiny; put her usual makeup on. She was hearing the soft humming of their robot butler, Codsworth, hovering over the floor of the brand new kitchen (pastel green, thanks to all the sweet-talking she did to Nathan), and smelled with delight the odor of freshly brewed coffee. On her way to the kitchen, she stopped by their son's room: still asleep in his crib, Shaun was breathing peacefully. Such a soothing sound.

Then, the first hint of what was next came up, into the form of a salesman at their doorstep. He was wearing a tan suit and that smile so typical of people used to bargaining.

"Good morning! Vault-Tec calling!" he exclaimed with unnatural joy.

She let a sight past her lips, and smiled gently:

"At least I can say you guys at Vault-Tec are enthusiasts, even in front of disappointed customers. We signed the first official demand to enter the neighborhood vault five months ago, then we had to prove my husband's veteran status four months ago, then we had to send paperwork one month ago then two weeks ago we sent back to you all the paperwork you told us was newly required... What's now?"

"Oh, ma'am, I'm sorry for the inconvenience. But I'm coming with good news: I'm here today to tell you that because of our family's service to our country, you have been accepted to enter Vault 111"

"You took your sweet time, huh?" asked Nathan's familiar voice in her back.

She turned to greet her husband, who was still in his pj's, beard unshaven and hair all over the place.

"Hi, honey! Don't worry, it's almost done now, I won't bother you anymore with this..."

"Yeah, yeah" he muttered, then to the salesman "We waited far too long to have you take into consideration my wife's rightful demands. Be glad she's more patient than me."

"Once again sir, I... I am very sorry for the inconvenience" he replied, facing the built like a tank man. "Just need your signatures, and then you'll be all clear to profit from your neighborhood's vault luxuries, in case of a... total nuclear annihilation."

Handing the clipboard to the woman still holding the door open, he smiled weakly, hoping that she would put herself between him and her companion. She smiled back, signed" Éléanore Jacquet-Johnson" at the bottom, and passed it at her husband. He signed with a grunt and gave it back to the salesman, who took it as if he was taking a bone out of a tiger's jaw. Apparently relieved to still have his arm, he took a step back and said:

"Wonderful! That's... everything... Just gonna walk this over to the Vault! Congratulations on being prepared for the future!"

Éléanore closed the door and turned to put a gentle hand on her husband's arm.

"Thanks, Nate. I know you don't get the point of all this but..."

"I know darling. Hard to forget your father's paranoid education, huh?"

"Come on, you like him, admit it." She teased him.

"He is a great guy, with a practical mind, and he raised you to be the greatest woman who ever walked this earth. " Nathan kissed her gently on the last word. "But he'd be even better if he didn't carry around this silly survival bag pack, convinced that doomsday is tomorrow."

"Survivor's kit" Éléanore corrected on a learned tone.

"Whatever you say, El. My sweet far-sighted paranoid wife"

She giggled at the obvious teasing, and they sat down at the counter, sipping their coffee while listening to the fear-inducing news on the TV. Same old, same old. Then Codsworth needed their help with Shaun, who was now fully awake and changed thanks to the robot. How he got to be so careful and precise with only a pair of pliers, a rotating saw and a flamer was still a mystery to El. Nate got the occasion to brag a bit about fixing the rocket mobile they bought at an attic sale, right after the first ultrasound of their son. Éléanore thanked him with a kiss, a wink, and a promise of the kind of walk in the park that brought Shaun in their house. He put some real clothes on in a fake hurry, telling her jokingly that he was not to be late to such a walk appointment, earning her laughter in return.

Then... Then everything went haywire. The newscaster stuttering over his notes, informing that nukes were falling from the sky, over New York, Pennsylvania, God knew where else... Sirens blasting in the neighborhood, Nathan running to get Shaun out of his crib, shouting at Codsworth to guard the house in a strange sense of priorities. El grabbed the hunting knife her father gave her as an eighteenth birthday - 'cause which teenage girl dreams of a new Walkman when she can get a knife - and stuffed it underneath her bra, between her breasts - cause why would ladies need pockets in their outfits, right? - then rushed at the door on her husband's footsteps. Running past the frightened neighbors, past the vault tec employees showing them the way, past the bridge behind their suburbs, past the fence gate where many, oh so many of their acquaintances were turned away by the security. They checked in quickly, El thanking the skies that the salesman did his job quickly, this time. She turned back while trotting uphill, catching a glimpse of all these familiar faces, and even the salesman's one, wondering what will happen of them. Nate tried to reassure her, but even he didn't believe it. When they arrived on the large platform - surrounded by crates, Vault-Tec security guards, and a few caravans- they were the last of around a dozen of their neighbors, along which the Callahans and the Ables, good friends of them.

Then they saw the bomb drop, far south of them, at the same time they felt the platform rumbling under their feet, starting its slow descent. It was like watching a thunderstorm, they saw the explosion before they heard it, creating scared gasps and horrified screams around them. The blow hit them, seconds before the platform was low enough to cover it with the sliding trap door. The calm hit the almost as hard, cold and dark.  
Lending on the ground at the bottom, they all looked shaken, not realizing what happened. Their anxious murmurs rang against the concrete walls, while Vault-Tec security exhorted them to proceed to the check-in.

When her turn arrived, El grabbed the blue and yellow jumpsuit the reassuring lady employee handed her. Everything felt... off, like unreal, unbelievable. She reached for Nathan's hand and didn't let go while the three of them followed the doctor who was introducing them to the vault. Why would she care that it was "Vault-Tec's most advanced facility", or believe that a "better future underground" was awaiting? It was the ~end of the world~ for God's sake.  
The family arrived in a room full of pipes and wires, linked to twelve weird pods with open doors. There, the doctor asked them to put their new jumpsuit on, hidden by merely a folding screen: Éléanore guessed that modesty was already a thing from the past. She took Shaun from Nathan's arms to let him change, then gave him back to put her jumpsuit on.

"Geez, this doesn't have pockets ~either~."

"You seriously brought your knife in here?" whispered Nathan. "Is it even allowed?"

"I don't know, and I don't really care. My father would disown me if he learned that I went through... this without a trusting knife. Besides, I don't plan on using it, it's just..."

Just a souvenir from him, she realized. She was probably not gonna see him ever again. It brought tears to her eyes.

"Oh, Papa, are you at least okay ?"

"Shhh, darling" Nathan said, embracing her. "We're fine, and he probably is too. He'll have his fine little bunker cave in the forest, telling everyone 'I told you so'"

She had a nervous chuckle. Even if it wasn't true, she could very well picture her dad like that. She took a sharp breath, slid the knife in the boot that was provided with the jumpsuit, and folded the folding screen. Following the doctor's indications, they stepped in their pods, listening to his explanations.

"The pod will decontaminate and depressurize you before we head deeper into the vault. Just relax"

She waved at her husband, who made Shaun wave back with his adorable little hand.

"Time for a whole new life" she whispered for herself.

"Resident secured" seemed to answer the metallic voice of the pod. "Occupant vitals: normal. Procedure complete, in 5... 4 …"

A chill ran down El's spine. Why was she so cold?

"3..."

She watched her breath form vapor in front of her eyes.

"2..."

If she could just close her eyes for a few minutes...

"1..."

She never heard that number.

* * *

She frowned in her sleep, trying to forget this horrible nightmare where the apocalypse happened, where she was put asleep by this weird pod just to wake up and see he husband being murdered by a bald scarred guy, and her son being taken by a woman dressed in a white protective hazmat suit. She should stop to watch these weird sci-fi horror movies on Thursday nights with Nate, it wasn't doing her any good. She tried to roll on her side and reach for the blanket he had once again taken all for him during his sleep. They should call the repairer, it wasn't normal for their house to be so cold with the heaters on, probably an isolation problem.

When her fingers hit the wall of the pod, she opened her eyes, realizing that she wasn't in her bed, that Nate wasn't next to her, that the heater of their house was now the least of her concern. Taking everything in like a kick in the gut, she froze in shock. It wasn't a nightmare.  
Coming back to her senses, she hit the door in front of her with her fists, desperate. Surprisingly, the door opened itself with a hiss, and she heard the metallic voice state:

"Critical failure in Cryogenic Array. All Vault residents must vacate immediately"

She stumbled out of her pod, falling on all four, her legs incapable of holding her weight. Shivering, coughing, it took her a few moments to be able to get to the pod in front of her. She gasped at the sight of her husband's blood, her hands shaking frantically while she tried to open the door.

"Non, non, non, non... Nathan..."

After she pulled the lever next to the pod, it opened, revealing it's terrible content. She fell again on her knees, holding her dead husband's legs and sobbing, feeling like someone had ripped her heart from her chest. She grabbed his frozen hand begging him to come back, to not let her alone. The metallic voice was still repeating its mantra.

"Critical failure in Cryogenic Array. All Vault residents must vacate immediately"

El didn't know how much time she spent in this position, but when she realized Nathan's hand was becoming warmer, she held back her sobs. She wasn't going to let him defrost and then decompose in here. Taking his wedding ring, she kissed his forehead, her tears wetting his skin. Pushing back the lever made the door close. Trying to contain the tears still dripping from her face, she checked in the other pods of the room. None of them opened, all their occupants seemingly sleeping. At the entrance of the room, the young woman found a terminal, which informed her that except her and Nate, everyone else was dead of asphyxiation. An isolate manual a remote override of the system had also been detected, and all the controls were seemingly disabled.

"Why would Vault-Tec do this?" whispered El, her hands resting on the keyboard of the terminal. "I can't be the only one here. There must be someone alive left".

Wiping her nose on the sleeve of her jumpsuit, she went to the automatic door, which slid open at the push of a button. Her steps echoing on the metal walls, still shivering a bit, she directed herself to the first room on her left. Even more Cryopods, even more dead frozen bodies inside. If she counted well, at least thirty people died from Vault-Tec's twisted sense of a 'better future underground'. It almost made her chuckle bitterly.

"Better future, mon cul oui"

She found the sound of her voice reassuring, and swearing in her native tongue made her feel almost alive. At least, even if the frosting, defrosting, re-frosting had impaired her reasoning capacities, she could still insult people in French.

"If there are still people somewhere..."

El walked out of the room, and headed towards the end of the hallway, where a sliding door with bright red lettering indicated 'Exit zone'. But when she pushed the button, the now-familiar metallic voice rang:

"Manual emergency exit door override. Please contact your Vault-Tec maintenance representative for service".

No exit, for now, she thought. Taking a few steps back, she went through the only other door of the hallway. There must be a terminal somewhere to open this putain de porte. Down a small flight of stairs, she arrived in another hallway and caught a glimpse of something she hoped was her imagination. Behind a sturdy window, she saw a giant cockroach, at least the size of a big cat, wiggle its antennas before dropping to the floor, out of her view.

"Merde, what was that?"

Her eyes fell on a security baton, that she immediately took and deployed. She could have otherwise taken her hunting knife out off her right boot, but that would mean taking the risk to approach these... things even closer. Not willing to stay to close from this window, nor from the door she feared to lead to the cockroach's room, she went looking for an exit in the small recess of the hallway. Quickly disappointed, she took the time to look into the terminal, hoping to find the security controls to opened that damned exit door.  
Instead, she learned that her whole neighborhood, her family and herself were used as human guinea pigs by Vault-Tec. The society apparently wanted to test how unaware people reacted to being put in cryogenic stasis.

"Badly, you twisted bastards" she spat.

Apparently, all the staff of the Vault was aware of what was going on. They were supposed to monitor everything, and not allowed to save anyone who died due to the stasis, given that more than 20% of the victims were still alive. According to the terminal, Vault-Tec was asking its employees to disregard even the government's notices. The staff of the vault was supposed to stay in there for a maximum of six months. Maybe it was the reason no one was there? They got the all-clear from their employer and left?  
The guy to whom the terminal belonged had written a few entries in it. It seemed that they waited for the all-clear so long that the food supplies got low and that the staff was beginning to turn crazy from the isolation. The last entry made it look like the security wanted to escape through the Overseer's office, who was against anyone exiting the vault. Maybe there was a riot? Anyway, she may be able to get to his office too and get out from there.

El stood away from the terminal and saw a Stimpack on the table. She saw some in movies before, where they had almost unbelievable healing capacities. Nathan told her that a Stimpack saved his life at the great battle of Anchorage, a mere handful of days before he was due to come home to her and his newborn. Cursing to the lack of pockets on the jumpsuit, she took it in her left hand and exhorted herself to get through the door leading further in the vault.  
It was another hallway, smaller this time, opening on what looked like the dining hall. And in the middle of the hallway, a cockroach. Quietly, she tried to walk past it, her back to the wall, but the giant insect detected her and ran to her with a threatening screech. Screaming in surprise, she crashed down her security baton on it, making it explode in a mess of chitin and greenish lymph.

"Ugh, disgusting..."

She wasn't used to killing an animal to defend herself against it. Her father took her hunting from time to time when she was a teenager, but firing a hunting rifle from afar was very different from that. Besides, the stags and hare never tried to munch on her shoes.

In the dining hall, she found a terminal with a video game on it -useless-, and two doorways: one to a dormitory, and the other to a small bathroom. In the first, some of the bunk beds were overturned, as if a fight happened? Maybe her riot theory was right. Nothing else in there than the beds and a few empty cardboard boxes. In the bathroom, she found a working sink. Realizing how thirsty she was, she drank to her heart's content. Eyeing the shower curtain, she thought about it a bit before ripping if off its rod. Tearing off a few hanging strands of it, she then knotted them around her shoulder and waist, creating a sort harness hanging at her back. It was probably the saddest excuse for a backpack she ever saw, but it allowed her to drop the Stimpack in it, along with a small glass bottle with a cork -both found in the dining hall-that she filled at the sink.

"Glass is not ze best material to carry your water araound, girl." she pointed, mimicking her father's tone and horrible accent.

The memories of her dad clenched her heart. But she couldn't let him down. She was going to find out what happened to her family, and why. Maybe she could even get Shaun back. She could raise him to be a fighter, like his dad and his grandpa. Refusing to consider how her hopes were thin, she continued her way in the fallout shelter.  
Éléanore found the first skeleton in the generator's room, after killing a second cockroach. It was wearing the same jumpsuit as her. She hoped it wasn't bad luck. The skeleton was white and clean as if it had been here for a while. Maybe the revolt of the staff happened a longer time ago than she thought.

After the next hallway, she entered what she guessed was the Overseer's office. Behind a desk lied another skeleton, and on the desk was placed a 10mm pistol, alongside some ammunition. Eagerly she grabbed it, loaded it, and felt a little bit safer. She wouldn't go far with fifteen rounds, but it was better than nothing. The door on the left wall was locked, once again.  
A terminal on the desk gave her access to the Overseer's entries. It lit anger in her, reading that man's words, who seemed to consider that the people Vault-Tec experimented on were lucky, and merely more than test material. She was glad an insurrection took place -her theory war right, according to the entries, the staff wasn't foud of the idea to be trapped here without food-, and wished that the remains behind hers were his. On the terminal, she found the remote control to open the door, and it slid open.  
Before she went through it, she rummaged in the office and the bedroom behind it. When heading to the next hallway, she had forty more rounds, a few bobby pins, and an intravenous bag of Radaway. She shivered at the idea of having to slide a needle in her arm herself. She ~hated~ needles.

In the hope of not wasting any ammunition, she tried to take on the five cockroaches of the hallway with her security baton, regretting it when she got a small cut on the back of her hand and a bigger one on her calf. Damn, it hurt. She never had any real injury in the past, except for a few falls from her bicycle and that one time when she was 5 when she tried to re-enact Marry Poppins by jumping from a wall with an open umbrella and ended up with a broken arm. Quite not an adventurer.  
Not wanting to get infected -who knew what these things ate before trying to eat her?-, she had to turn back to wash the scratches in the sink of the Overseer's bathroom.

"I hope there are not too many of these cockroaches out there. They are nasty little things".

She, finally, made it to the entrance: the impressive Vault door was facing her. One last insect was awaiting, and this time, she put a bullet right through it. Her aim was good -the thing wasn't too far either-, but she wasn't used to firing with a pistol, and not being able to catch the recoil with her shoulder felt weird.

El, remembering how she found the bullets, searched through the lockers of the room, and congratulated herself when she found some more. Now to the door: it was closed, and the console next to the railing informed her that she needed a 'Pip-Boy' in order to open it. She then noticed the weird cuff-thing the skeleton at her feet were wearing.  
Curious, she took it, letting out a sound of disgust when the arm bones slept through it and hit the floor, and wrapped it around her own left arm, closing the metal clasp. It emitted a few beeps and clicks, before turning on, bright green letters filling the screen. Maybe that was a Pip-Boy? It seemed to inform her of her general health stuff, like heart rate, blood pressure, body heat... Under these was written: "Analysis of health data: 98% chances of high adrenaline blood rates."

"No shit, Sherlock" El muttered.

After a few minutes of fiddling through the menus -this thing had a map menu, maybe she could find use to it-, she noticed that she could plug a wire from the cuff to the console. Doing so allowed her to access the button controlling the gate opening. She hit it with her fist, eager to get out of this glorified tomb.  
With lots of sirens, revolving lights and hissing sound, the huge gear-shaped vault door slid back and rolled to the side, letting the way open for the railing to slide through the opening.

She was getting out of here.


	2. Mon Dieu

She was getting out of here.

The sun, at his top, blinded her for a few moments. When her sight returned, her breath stopped in her throat. Everything... Everything was a mess. Not only a mess but also old: the metal walls of the control caravan and the big containers surrounding the platform were covered in rust, a tipped crane bent in the middle was inches away from tumbling down and a car wreck was turned upside down on what was once a pristine asphalt road leading uphill. The wire fences circling the vault entrance were barely hanging to their post, skeletons were laying here and there and she could hear crows croaking in the sky. In her mind, she spent 48 hours in this underground facility, tops. In front of her eyes laid the proof that her estimation of the time past in there, even given the information she found on the terminals, was greatly underrated.  
Also, the trees... Not only them but also the grass, the bushes, they all looked dull, the leaves and strands hesitating between pale green and dusty brown. Slowly turning on her spot, she let out a shaking breath, on the verge of tears.

"Where... Where is everyone?"

The silence answered her question. She took a few steps to go sit on the access ramp of the caravan. Getting out of the vault seemed to have taken away her strength, and she felt tears in her eyes, again.

" Don't cry. Don't cry. It's gonna be fine. Go home, sleep a bit, eat something... It's gonna be fine." she admonished herself.

She glanced in the caravan and took what she could from it - not much, a can of water and another Stimpack-, then she began to head home. When she reached the fence gates, she forced herself to ignore the mass of bones piled up there, on the other side. She walked past them trying not to recognize her neighbors' clothes in the pile of human remains and tattered cloth. Crossing the bridge at the bottom of the hill, El stepped reluctantly in her dear suburb.  
The walls of the houses had holes in them, some roofs had crumbled inside the houses: out of the couple dozens of house here, half were still deserving the title of 'house'. The concrete of the sidewalk let the sick looking grass grow out of its cracks, as did the asphalt of the road. Branches were left where they fell from the trees, a few of the street lights were knocked over, and not a single mailbox or road sign was rust free.

"What did you expect, huh? That the nuclear apocalypse would have spared your little suburban life just to be nice to you? You stupid girl..."

El turned left and walked to her house, carefully glancing around her. She would not be happy to crossroads again with the giant insects from the vault. A metallic glint in the distance caught her eye: she raised her head, discovering a familiar silhouette in front of her doorstep.

"Codsworth?"

She began to trot towards the robot, before actually running to her old butler.

"Codsworth!"

He was pruning the flower bed under the living room windows as if it was another normal day in her normal life. She could almost have believed it if her carefully chosen hydrangea hadn't turned into a pitiful bunch of dry twigs and yellow leaves. He seemed to hear her arrive because he turned his three vision sensors in her direction.

"As I live and breathe... It's... It's REALLY you!"

"Oh, Codsworth, you're still here!" she said in a strangled voice. "What... What happened here? I mean... everywhere? Everything is... Dead."

"Don't worry Mum, your flowers are still making others pale in comparison at Sanctuary Hills. Apart from that, I'm afraid that things have been quite dull around here, I must say." replied the robot, apparently truly concerned about what she thought of his gardening skills. "But now that you and Sir are coming back, I expect life to get much more exciting! Where is he by the by? I'm afraid I have some bad news about the car for him..."

"Nathan is... He's not coming back, Codsworth. He has been killed in this damned Vault." she let out.

"Oh, Mum, these terrible thoughts you entertain... Let's distract you from these. I know! Charades! It will please little Shaun at the same time, the young lad loves them! Do you happen to have him with you?" the eagerness in his voice sounded almost forced.

" Shaun is... Oh, my poor boy, they took him, they killed his father and they took him! "

She clasped her arms around herself, unable to contain her tears. Codsworth came next to her and gently stroked her shoulder with his flamer.

"There there Mum, don't you worry. You are probably suffering from hunger-induced paranoia and emotional liability. After all, you are two hundred years late for dinner!"

"Two hundred years? What? You mean..."

"A tad bit over 210 years, actually Mum. Give or take for the rotations of Earth and some inaccuracies in my old chronometer."

She faltered, the realization slowly sinking in. No wonder that everything was so rusty, so dilapidated, so... so not what she knew. She thought about the people she knew, they had to all be dead now, long forgotten and returned to dust. Everyone...

"No..." the young woman protested against her own thoughts. "Shaun is still out there, somewhere, I can find him!"

"Come on Mum, are you sure you are not interested in a little breakfast? I am sure it would do good, food is always good to fight against dire mood."

"Codsworth, are you okay?" she asked, trying to contain her irritation at her robot's obliviousness of what she said. "You honestly sound off-the-wall right no... Did you rust on the inside also?"

The robot seemed to hesitate for a bit, scratching a bit of rusted metal off his saw arm with his pliers, then let it all out:

"I'm sorry Mum, but it has been all so terrible, two centuries without anyone to serve, anyone to talk to. I tried my best to maintain the house for you to return, but do you know how hard it is to clean radioactive dust out of crackled linoleum? And could we talk about how watering the garden is a nightmare when running water is out of the equation? Let me say that the weather has not been very comprehensive of my needs in terms of grass hydration..."

"Codsworth, I'm sorry, but focus a bit there. Do you have an idea of where Shaun could be?"

She had little hope, and when he told her to follow him around the neighborhood to see if 'the little lad and his dad' were somewhere near, she was convinced the metallic butler didn't get what she said, and also almost sure he had fried a few fuses up there. Either way, she obliged, maybe he would regain his senses after realizing Nathan and Shaun were not here.

After the second house, she came to regret the giant cockroaches from the vault. The houses had giant _flies _as hosts, with bloated abdomens and wings that seemed too small for their size. And worst of all, they spew the content of said abdomen on her to attack. And worst _worst _of all, the content of their abdomen was their larvae along with some venom. Very nice. She was glad to see Codsworth's flamer put to good use here, and felt a weird satisfaction at the sight of the bugs turning into piles of ashes on the ground.

When the tour of the neighborhood ended, all the bloated flies were dealt with, but Éléanore was feeling dizzy and weak. Not only the larvae had made holes into her jumpsuit -in fact, three little holes forming the triangle of their fangs -, but she had received a good amount of venom on the left side of her jaw and neck and it had dripped inside her jumpsuit, provoking a red burning rash on her soft skin.  
Resisting the urge to scratch herself, which may just make things worse, she headed towards the river running under the bridge leading to Sanctuary Hills. On her way, she couldn't help but remember when Nathan and her first arrived here to move in. The bridge was sturdy and clean back then, not partially collapsed; the trees were healthy and the river clear, without all these branches, tires, old furniture in it. Furthermore, Sanctuary was then buzzing with activity, some people having a BBQ night, others walking next to the river, children giggling in the playground.  
El felt her heart clench one more time, and despair started to gnaw on her: all the humans she saw since she left her underground prison were remains. Where there anyone who could help her find her son? Would anyone even care? She knelt on the bank, are went to splash her face with water, before hearing her Pip-Boy emit ticking some. Perplexed, she pressed it again her hear, and the ticking stopped immediately.

"Et merde..." she whispered. "Hey, Codsworth! Is that water radioactive? It seems there's a Geiger counter in that watch-thing, and it's ticking."

"Well, Mum, I must say that given the state of our dear Commonwealth today, I'd be quite surprised if you were to find a river carrying radiation-free water..."

"Great. I was starting to think that this apocalypse stuff was too easy for someone of my caliber" she muttered, her hand pressed against her neck.

"Do not worry, Mrs. Éléanore! Dare I say, I'm the robot of the situation. If you could lend me a minute..."

Codsworth started to rumble quietly, a different sound than his habitual propulsor. Before his owner could ask what was wrong, he exclaimed joyfully:

"And here you are, Mum! If you please, just put your hands under this little evacuation canal, and I should provide you with freshly condensed morning dew!"

And indeed, the robot started leaking warm water out of his shell, and she was able to splash her face and neck, reducing the itching. She sighed with relief:

"You're a gift from the gods, Cods'"

"Ah, Mum, my genius designers at General Atomics would be very pleased to hear you hold them in such high regard. If they were still alive, of course..."

The sigh she let out this time was painful.

"Mum, I must ask you... Those things you said about Sir and the little Shaun... It is true, isn't it?" seeing her nod, he continued. "Well, I must immediately give you this. Sir made it for you the day before... Before you left."

Opening a storage compartment, he handed her a holotape. The recognizable handwriting on it, reading 'Hi honey', put a lump in her throat. After she loaded it in the tape reader of her Pip-Boy, the voice of her husband and the babbling of her son broke her heart.

"Oops, haha. Keep those little fingers away... Ah, there we go. Just say it, right there, right there, go ahead... Ah, yay! Hi honey, listen... I don't think Shaune and I need to tell you how great of a mother you are. But, we're going to anyway. You are kind, and loving, and funny, that's right, and patient. So patient, patience of a saint as your mother used to say. Look, with Shaun and us all being home together it's been an amazing year but even so I know our best days are yet to come."

She let out a strangled sob at those words.

"There will be changes sure, things we'll need to adjust too. I'll rejoin the civilian workforce, you'll finally get to truly show the world how much of a great lawyer you are. But everything we do no matter how hard, we do it for our family. Now say goodbye Shaun. Bye-bye, say bye-bye? Bye honey, we love you."

* * *

The day was quietly coming to an end. The wind was blowing softly in the trees and grass, creating a soft rustle. Sitting against the huge centenary oak in the middle of the place she used to live in, Éléanore was done wiping tears out of her face. Her eyes were puffed, her nose red, and she felt hollow inside. She exited Vault 111 early in the middle of the morning, and it was now almost 8 PM. She hadn't eaten anything, as her entire afternoon had been spent listening over and over to the holotape Nate had left her three days ago. Two hundred years ago.

As a breeze colder than the others blew, she shivered. It was October after all, the sun wasn't warming her anymore as it was on the horizon, she wore nothing under her jumpsuit and her silly shower curtain harness wasn't a proper way to contain body heat.

"Mum..." politely approached Codsworth, who had been waiting patiently for her all this time. "If I may, it would certainly be useful that you find a place to rest tonight. You could certainly benefit from a good night of sleep, and probably something to eat..."

"You're right Cods." her voice was emotionless. "Do you know what I could take as food?"

"It depends on what you're looking for Mum, but I personally can bring you some Sugar Bombs, if you want. Some of your neighbors were stocking them like in unhealthy amounts."

"Sure. It would be great"

"On my way then!"

As he left to rummage in one of the still-standing house -the Ables' she realized, she never thought Mrs. Able's obsession over cereal would serve her someday- she stood up and felt how tired she was. A few moments later, her butler came back with a faded box of Sugar Bombs. El took it with a thanks and told him that she had an idea as were to sleep.

"Mr. Jahani had a cellar built under his house a few months before... Well before he had the occasion to put it to good use. He was so secretive about it, yet everyone in the neighborhood knew... Either way, it may have survived all this, and I'd prefer not to sleep alone in a house full of holes."

"What a sensible idea Mum! I shall keep watch over the entrance, so no one will disturb you during a well deserved night of rest."

She wondered if anyone was even present in a five miles radius, but didn't contradict him. She was too exhausted to argue anyway.  
The cellar was small and smelled like it hadn't seen fresh air in about two centuries, but it was warm and it luckily contained some useful stuff - old preserved food, a few cans of water, a radio, a first aid kit with a Stimpack in it-. More importantly, a mattress was lying on a pallet bed base, against one of the bare cinder block walls. The blanket on it had been white in another life and had a quite moldy smell, and there was no pillow to be seen, but she didn't care. She barely took time to take off the knots of her curtain and munch on a handful of cereals before lying down in the dark.  
El felt empty and was sure that she would never fell asleep. She just felt... nothing, not even sadness anymore. Turning to her side, she winded the blanket around her, wondering if it wouldn't be better to wait for death on this mattress.

And, on this dark thought, she fell asleep.


	3. Baltique

She fell asleep on this dark thought.

She woke up with a coated tongue and a rumbling stomach. Lightened by her Pip-Boy, she opened a can of water and finish the box of Suger Bombs she started the night before. Her few belongings thrown in her shower curtain, as a bundle over her shoulder, she then climbed the ladder to exit the cellar. Even through the morning mist, the sunlight was almost too bright after the true darkness of her underground bedroom. That or her eyes were still suffering from her two hundred and ten years long sleepover at Vault-Tec shelter. Who knew?  
Codsworth, seeing her, lifted from the ground he appeared to have laid on for the night.

"Good morning Mum! I wish I could offer you a cup of that Brazilian roasted coffee you're so fond of, but it became a rarity a mere three years after the bombs dropped."

"That's not a big deal Cods, if I'm being honest..." she sighed. "I'm just so lost now, I don't know what to do..."

"Well Mum, you told me yesterday that the last time you saw little Shaun, he was still alive, right?" seeing the young woman nod, he pursued. "Then you can't give up, Mum. What about the city? Concord is nearby, and, well, the people there have only shot at me a few times... Maybe you could try to find pieces of information about him there, don't you think?"

She felt bad realizing that it was her robot who was motivating her to _find her son_. What kind of a mother was she, to just imagine giving up like that, without a fight? Nate wouldn't have abandoned their son. So neither would she.

"You're right Cods. I can't give up. I just need to find a proper backpack, because I don't see myself carrying my shower curtain during a two and a half hour hike."

"Hurray Mum! I knew my owners always had such a strength of mind!" he started following her as she went to look for a good hiking bag. "Do you wish me to come with you? I'm no Mr. Gutsy, but you may need a bit of company on this trip."

"Mmmm, I don't know" she hesitated. "I'm not sure it's a good idea if those people at Concord trier to shoot you. Maybe they did think you're a Mr. Gutsy, and I wouldn't want to make them think I'm threatening them with a robot."

"I see Mum. Sensible, as always." the robot said with a touch of disappointment.

"Don't feel bad, you can help me just as much by staying here!" she felt sorry about turning him down. "I plan on coming back here after looking through Concord. In the meantime, if you can gather all the bottles you find in the neighborhood and fill them with water, it'd be wonderful."

"No problem Mum! I don't know if I'll be able to produce a lot, as it's just my circuit protection system that allows me to evacuate water. I was never programmed to become a reliable source of water I'm afraid..."

"I'm sure it'll be perfect."

She eventually found a sturdy enough backpack in one of the houses. She now had to do some sorting, because by looking for a bag, she also found a few other interesting items: she didn't understand why so much was still there, after all these years. Maybe the area wasn't busy with people? She had to reluctantly renounce to open a few safes, as she didn't have the time to find a way to do it. She'd come back for them later.  
Nonetheless, she felt pretty good about what she had packed at the end: around three liters of water in various little bottles -to drink as much as to clean potential wounds-; two cans of Cram 'quality processed meat', a box of Sugar Bombs, three cans of Pork n' Bean, two packets of InstaMash -even if InstaGooeyPasteBarelyTastingLikePotatoes was more like it-; five Stimpaks; two rolls of gauze that were once upon a time sanitized; a bottle of cheap Vodka to sterilize things if needed; a flip lighter and some matches; a compass in case her Pip-boy gave up on her -was it even waterproof?-; all the 10mm rounds she was able to find -around a hundred and fifty, she was lucky to find a cache in the crazy old lady of her street's house-; a few bottles of drugs, antibiotics, and mild pain killers; a syringe of MedX, to use only in emergency cause this was _not_ a mild pain killer.  
She also had adjusted her clothing situation, keeping on her jumpsuit as it only had two small holes in it, but putting on an old leather duster on top and adding a few pairs of mismatched socks in her pack -nothing worse as walking with soaked socks-. Of course, her hunting knife was at her side along with her 10mm pistol in a hip holster. The twenty or so houses of Sanctuary Hills were still containing some pretty good things after all these years.

Finally ready, she waved Codsworth goodbye and crossed the bridge leading outside of Sanctuary Hills. On the other side, she stumbled upon two dead bodies: one of a man dressed as a traveler, and one of a horribly deformed hound with terrifying jaws and almost hairless skin.  
She shivered when she saw the face of the man: it was barely human-looking anymore, the feral dog apparently crushed it with its jaws before it died by the shot the traveler managed to shoot at its forechest. Do not try to mess with those dogs, girl, she noted to herself. She noticed that the man had used against the dog was looking like a bunch of wood and metal scraps assembled together, clearly handmade. It didn't look trustworthy at all, she could very well picture it blowing in her hands. However, maybe the guy had some ammo? Éléanore hesitated for a bit, before deciding that he wasn't going to need it more than her: she rummaged through his pack and found some .38 rounds, not what she could use right now, but she decided to keep it anyway. Along with it was some unknown meat jerky, and two bottles of very unappealing looking water. She decided to pack it all, you never know. Feeling almost proud of her discovery for an instant, she suddenly felt guilty: a man was dead, of a horrible death, and here she was, happy to collect his belongings for herself.  
She dragged him to lay on the side of the road, looked upon by a bunch of blue-ish unknown flowers, and positioned his arm crossed on his chest and a square piece of cloth from his pack on his face.

"May you rest in peace, stranger."

Her words sounded false, but she felt like she had to say something. She just hoped that the fact the first 'recent' person she had seen was dead was not predictive of the next encounters. She'd much prefer to be able to speak to them. Having wasted enough time of the day, she turned on her heels and headed to the road leading to Concord.

It was almost a straight line of asphalt to the southeast, typical four lines road, without any house near it. She walked like this for around forty-five minutes, her gun in her hand, trying to look out for any other dog. It had been a quiet part of the Boston area before the bombs dropped, and it seemed to have stayed the same afterward because, after almost an hour of walking, nothing happened to her. Coming on top of a little hill, she saw on the other side the typical sign of a Red Rocket station. She used to stop here to fill up with gas, and also complain about how the prices were rising. Feeling a bit thirsty, and eager to take a break, she headed towards it.

"You're not a the top of your fitness, girl. Are the years you won the orienteering races of your school so far?"

Suddenly realizing that they were, she wondered once again if the cryogenic sleep had impaired her physical abilities. After all, she was merely a test subject to an unregulated scientific study. She'd probably never learn the extent of the damage Vault-Tec had caused to her and others. Were all the other Vaults cryogenic facilities in disguise?  
El reached the station and was surprised to see a beautiful German Shepherd sitting on the concrete between rusted out cars, under the roof protecting the now useless pumps. It didn't look like the mongrel she saw earlier, and more like a typical family dog waiting for his owners. Still cautious, she approached it with her empty hand in front of her.

"Hey, pup... Are you a nice boy? I'm a nice girl, so be good, okay?" The dog stood with a curious whimper and wagged its tail at her. He was probably safe to stroke, right? She put her hand lightly on his head, and he lingered in it, his tail wagging even more. "Good boy," she said with a smile. "You don't seem to quite fit here, are you lost? Did you lose your family?" He seemed to respond by a playful bark and did a few turns around her, as if he wanted to greet her. "I'm gonna take a break here for a moment, then I'm heading to Concord. You can follow me if your owners are there."

He barked again. Either she was imagining things, or he was understanding what she was saying. Probably the former: waking up in a devastated wasteland after witnessing your family being ripped apart wasn't the best thing for your mental health, right?  
She went to enter the station, but stopped on her way when she heard a rumble. The nape of her neck tingled in an unpleasant way.

"Something's wrong, you feel it too, right boy?" she asked the dog.

He was growling, the fur on his spine risen in a threatening way. She just had the time to hope it wasn't for her, before the ground burst a few feet in front of her, letting out a hideously naked giant mole, with front teeth as long as her fingers. The thing was shrieking, and she replied with a scream of her own, her heartbeat through the roof.  
El backed off, stumbling, and felt a car bonnet behind her legs. She crawled on it, crouched, and aimed at the mole with unsteady hands. Fucking adrenaline making her shaky. The naked animal wasn't alone, and now there were three at the station. She shot the one that was closer to her, then aimed at the two fighting against the German Shepherd a dozen yards away. She had to wait for a fire window, in fear of hurting the poor dog with her mediocre gun skills. Three of her bullets went to waste in the ground, but two found there target. The thing wasn't dead yet, but certainly unable to dig anymore.  
The dog snapped the neck of the last one in two with a disgusting crunch. El was going to claim victory, when she felt something heavy hit her with force in the back. She fell from the car with a scared gasp, and hit the ground on her belly. The 10mm pistol slipped out of her hands, and she just had the time to roll on her back to stop the giant mole that jumped from carving a hole in her skull with its gigantic teeth. Holding it by the neck, ignoring the snapping of its incisors and the claws of its hind leg ripping through the flesh on her thigh, she reached for her hunting knife and stabbed the beast between the ribs frenetically, letting out a primal scream.  
El pushed the corpse of the mole on the side and leaned on the car to stand on her weak-at-the-knees legs. Catching on her breath, she noticed that the dog had taken on a fifth of the animal that attacked them while she was struggling on the ground. It undoubtedly saved her life. The German Shepherd was certainly looking better than her now, he only had a small scratch on his muzzle. From her part, El was disheveled, hands grazed by the concrete, covered in mole blood on her chest, and her own on the left thigh. The dog came to her with a sad whimper and sniffed cautiously her wound.

"You're the goodest boy, you know that? You saved my life..." the young woman said while stroking his head. "You know it's the first time I used this expression literally? The last time I said it was probably to thank a friend who brought me a coffee at work."

She scoffed, taking her backpack off her shoulders, and heading to seat on the dinner counter of the station. Opening her package, she took out water, Vodka, and a Stimpak.

"And here you are, girl," she said while opening the two bottles. "Sitting in a dilapidated gas station, pouring... ouch... pouring water on the wound you got by fighting a giant naked mole, and talking to a dog as if it could understand you."

She chugged a few gulps from the water bottle and returned it empty to her pack. Reaching for the vodka, she sighed

"And then, instead of drinking this toilet cleaner like you used to do in college, you're going to pretend it won't hurt to pour it on those."

El went for it.

"Putain de merde! Nique ta mère, saloperie de taupe de mes couilles!"

It felt like she'd put molten metal inside her thigh. Tears leaked from her eyes, and she punched the counter, clenching her teeth. The dog whimpered, and she went to scratch him behind the ear.

"Don't worry boy, it just tickles a little"

The pain tears turned into despair ones. She was never going to survive all these. She barely made it through the first morning on this desolate land. The adrenaline wearing off, she truly realized how close to death she'd just been.

"You thinking you can go and save your son is clearly a delusional and borderline insane idea."

El absolutely agreed with herself. But what was the saying again? She would do it or die trying. Shouldn't take long, given her amazing combat skills. Taking the Stimpak off the counter, she removed the cap of the needle and tried to not think too much about it when she punctured the skin above her thigh wound and emptied half of the syringe. Gotta be thrifty.

"Hey, it seems that getting attacked by a giant irradiated animal can cure you from being scared of needles. Guess it put things in perspective."

* * *

On the road again, this time accompanied by a friendly dog, El was amazed by how the Stimpak was quick at healing her. What was, a couple dozen minutes ago, four straight tears as long as her hand, was now a rosy and bumpy scar, still fresh but definitely healthy-looking. Blessed be science-stuffs.

They were now in the west part of Concord, meaning more cars on the road and more houses next to it, opened to the four winds. El did stop a few times to forage through some of them, hoping to find some more first aid supplies, but came back empty-handed except for two unopened bottles of water. Not willing to waste daytime, she renounced to look through more houses, nonetheless taking note that some houses had food and a few clothes in them, in case she ever came back here.  
South of her, she saw the walls of the nearby prison. Charming, she thought. Someone would have to pay her vacations to the Bahamas to make her enter a two hundred years old abandoned prison. Leaving the creepy building behind her, she entered what used to be a nice family-friendly neighborhood. Two hundred years ago, the houses were a bit outdated, especially compared to the pristine Sanctuary Hill, but still welcoming. Now, with loose hanging shutters or boarded up windows, peeling paint or plain crumbled walls, and some houses displaying skeletons at the front door, it was the picture of a ghost town. The wind howling in the trees, carrying dead leaves and dust was not helping either.

El and the dog kept going on the main road, leading straight to the center of Concord. She could now see the outline of the small city center, on the other side of the Sudbury River. The sun was at its peak, and her stomach was rumbling. She made the two of them stop on the bridge crossing the river. She felt more comfortable not surrounded by trees that blocked her view. Let's just hope that no irradiated animal is lurking in the river.  
They both sat, the woman leaning against the stone guardrail. She opened a can of Cram for the dog, hoping that the ridiculous amounts of salt in the thing was not going to make him sick, and took a packet of Instamash for herself, along with some water for both of them. Surprisingly, the potato paste tasted almost the same as she remembered. Still horrible, mind you, but pretty much the same.

El was talking to her canine companion as if he could care about her past life. She told him about Nathan and Shaun, and why she had to try to get her son back, should it be only to honor the memory of her brave husband. The muzzle of the dog was resting on her lap, and she felt almost a bit less sad to speak about it.

"That's a psychology trick, right? Talking about things to make them more bearable or something?" she asked the dog. He yawned. "Okay Dr. Freud, message received. We're on our way. Next time, I plan on speaking to you about how guilty I feel for not being the tearful wife I should be."

He nudged at her leg a little, and they finished crossing the bridge. After passing by a few detached houses, they entered the more densely constructed Concord city center.

And they heard the gunshots.


	4. Le temps des cerises

And they heard the gunshots.

Oh my gosh, she thought, rushing to flatten herself to the nearest wall. Of course other people would have guns too, stupid. Her heart was racing in her chest, and seeing the dog flatten his ears on the back and showing his teeth wasn't doing anything to reassure her. Let's just hope they're shooting at some moles or flies.  
She checked her pistol to make sure it was fully loaded, as she was painfully slow to reload it. Moving on deliberately, trying to stay in the shadow of the apartment building, she headed to the door. Maybe if she could get on the balcony, she would be able to see further in town and evaluate whether or not it was safe to go on.  
Entering the hallway, she witnessed once again how time could destroy what humans built, as she almost tripped on a shelf that must have fallen from its wall a century ago. A few steps in, and she stopped, hearing a rumble upstairs. The dog started growling, turning toward the stairs on heir left.

"Who's there? Show yourself, scumbags!"

The sound of another human voice made her jolt. That and the fact that it was definitely not friendly. The man was clearly not happy to have someone entering his place.

"I... I'm sorry!" she apologized loudly. "I didn't know the place belonged to someone... I'm leaving right now!"

"Scared, huh? You should be!"

Footsteps above her rushed to the stairs and before she had time to make more than a few strides back, the man was in front of her, overlooking her with a sadistic grin and a crazy look in his eyes. He was waving the same kind of weapon that she saw on the deceased man at the limits of Sanctuary and had an armor made of mismatched pieces of rusted metal, leather and cloth.  
El froze like a deer caught in the headlights. She'd never been threatened by anyone with a gun, and her brain was apparently unable to process it. Fortunately, when she felt a bullet skim past her shoulder, she managed to duck behind the once-red couch on her right.

"Ya lucky I haven't had any Jet for four days, ya noisy bitch! But the next one is not gonna miss ya!"

The next one did miss her, by ending into the back of the couch. El let out a scream of terror. Either she stayed hidden and he'd go around the couch and kill her, or she let her head and hands outside of the cover and he'd kill her.

"But if ya play nice with me, I may end things quick so ya won't have to see what I'm gonna do to that nice body of yours."

The lust oozing from his voice twisted her guts. What kind of psychopath was she in front of? Suddenly, she heard him scream in pain. In a surge of reckless combat instinct, she jumped on her legs with a guttural yell and emptied her magazine in the man immobilized by the dog's jaws firmly closed around his calf. Her eyes shut on the first shot, and she only stopped when she heard her trigger clicking in the nothing.  
He had shot at her too but apparently missed under the pain, creating impacts on the stripped wallpaper behind her, way too high. When the silence fell, the realization of what she did hit her. She dropped her gun on the ground and rushed to the corpse laying there.

"Oh putain... I killed someone... Oh non, non non non non non..."

He was alive a few moments ago, and here he wasn't anymore, and it was because of her. She was a murderer.

"No, no... I... I was defending myself, he... he is the one who shot first, right?"

Her bargaining wasn't even convincing herself: after all, she was the one who trespassed in his house, and even back in her time that was a reason some people took to shoot someone else. She was kneeling at his side and looking with horror at his face like it would cancel what she did. He had chestnut curly hair, round and now glassy deep blue eyes, and hints of freckles under the grim of his face: apart from the scar that was running on his jaw, he was juvenile looking, he couldn't be older than twenty-five. Couldn't be older than her. The dried, old blood splattered on his mismatched armor, contrasting with his own, could not take her away from the fact that she had ended a human life.

She cried on his body. El's tears wet his armor as they had wet Nathan's legs, and that felt wrong, but she couldn't stop herself. The dog was sitting beside her, patiently waiting to see what would happen next. This time, her weeping didn't last longer than five minutes. She was feeling dull.  
The woman took a few sharp breaths, put her hand on the man's face and closed his eyes almost solemnly.

"May you rest in peace, stranger."

Her voice was cold, and she took care to conceal her pain behind the numbness of her thoughts. She just had to find Shaun, and then she could rest and think about all of this. The man's pockets had nothing interesting in them, so she just emptied his handmade pistol from its ammunition. Thinking back to it, she was glad that her mother had forced her to take those shooting lessons when they moved to the US. She was no sharpshooter with a handgun, far from it, but she was capable of cleaning, reloading and unloading one without much hassle.  
Upstairs, El found three sleeping bags, and some empty red inhalers, with 'Jet' written over them. That was what the man was talking about, right? Was it some kind of drug or something? Maybe the withdrawal had taken its toll on his capacities and prevented him from being the one who survived their encounter. Nothing worth taking was in here, as the three people that seemed to occupy this house had only left spare clothes, empty beer bottles and what looked like weird and almost rotten tomatoes. No way she was eating these.

"Stop shaking, stupid hands," she grumbled to herself while scouring through the stuff of the man she murdered. "He was going to kill you and probably rape you, apparently in this order. It's neither the time or the place to have remorse."

She clicked her tongue to tell the dog that they were exiting the building. She was going to find a truly abandoned house to get on a balcony, to make sure that the two associates of the dead guy weren't going to block her issues. Peeking discreetly in the street, she was relieved to see that no one seemed to be here, and the dog followed her eagerly on the way to the center of Concord.

They passed a few buildings without balcony or roof access, including a small public library. El remembered that it was a nice place before the bombs. When she was pregnant with Shaun, she used to come here to see enjoy the coolness of the brick walls, and the nice selection of both sci-fi novels and law manuals. Now the walls would have trouble holding a breeze, given that a whole corner of the library had collapsed on the ground.  
A block after the library, the gunshots were louder, and she was now bent in two in the shadow of the buildings, trying to be as discreet as possible. There were pauses in the shots, long enough to make her think that things were over, but it kept on. The dog, proving once again how much he understood for a dog, was slowly following El with his ears flattened against his head.

They finally reached an emergency exit railway on the side of a small inn -Concord's Colonial Inn actually-, and they proceeded to the roof. El had no intention of getting involved in the shooting but wanted to take a peek. If the people shooting were doing so at moles or hounds, she could lend them a hand from up here without taking much risk, and then ask for their help in exchange. If it was people shooting at other people... well, it was a different story. She just wished that it wasn't the guy's friends, otherwise, she was in all probability screwed.  
Carefully walking on the side of the roof the furthest from the gunshots, El hoping that the dog wouldn't slip, they passed the inn and arrived on the roof of a house at the corner of the street, making her head on the right. At the end of this street, she saw the Museum of Freedom of Concord, with its circular American flags and four decorative columns. What looked like the tail of a vertibird was sticking out of the roof of the building. But it wasn't what caught her eyes. On the balcony of the third floor, a man was standing, flattened against the brick arch overseeing his perch. In his hands was an unusual looking rifle, glowing red in the middle.  
He cranked something on his rifle, leaned out of cover, and shot at someone down in the street, creating a bright red ray of pure energy. El wasn't used to laser weapons, and the sound made her jump a little. Crouching as close to the roof as she could, she got to the top of it and peeked at the street. Down there, she saw about three people hiding being piles of sandbags, and three corpses laid on the tar of the road. They were all wearing the same kind of protection as the guy who attacked her, but before she could head back and try to hide from the fight, she heard someone shout at her.

"Hey, you! On the roof! Look up here, on the balcony! I've got settlers inside! Help us, please!"

It was the man with the weird rifle calling her. What an idiot!

"Shhh, imbécile!" she said between her clenched teeth.

The man did a great job at turning the attention of the people on the street towards her. They shouted at her some kind of insults and started moving to get a better shot at her position. Laying on her belly, almost completely hidden by the roof, she extended her arms to aim at the closest one, a woman in tattered leather clothes with big black diamonds painted on her eyes. She had little chance to hit her at this distance, given the fact that her 10mm pistol wasn't made for long-range shooting.  
Fortunately, the woman's pistol was worse than El's and hadn't the advantage of the height. El missed a few shots, but managed to put one right through the other woman's chest. At the exact same moment, she felt a violent pain on her left shoulder, and clenched at her gun, involuntarily shooting a bullet at the sky. One of the other people on the street had managed to aim well enough to graze her deltoïd. It felt like her whole shoulder was on fire though and she groaned, praying that her tears wouldn't blur her vision too much.

"You're such a softie..." she admonished herself.

She turned to the man that shot at her, but the guy on the balcony was faster and more accurate than she was. The fact that their attackers went out of cover to shoot at her made his job easier, and they were soon enough two piles of ashes, faintly glowing red.

"La vache... Energy weapons are no jokes..."

El let out a breath she didn't realize she was holding, and moved to the end of the roofs, to the next fire exit she found, the dog still on her heels.

"Are you half-goat or something? Never saw a dog so relaxed on heights you know."

The street seemed too calm now. The woman headed toward the museum -each step making her wince in pain because of her shoulder- in hope to have a talk with the guy up there that got her shot -yeah, he shot those two guys too, but it was him who blew her cover- and hopefully get some pieces of information from him. But before she could even speak, he shouted at her again:

"There are still raiders inside! We're trapped in a room! Grab that laser musket and come in, I'll cover you through the inside window!"

"But I'm not..." she started, but the man had already entered the building.

El felt deeply conflicted. She wasn't a fighter, she wasn't a soldier by any stretch of the imagination. And she didn't want to have to kill anybody else. But those people inside needed help, and she couldn't let them on their own. The young woman wasn't thinking straight, as the adrenaline of her recent fights didn't have the time to fade.  
The dog scratching the door with sad whimpers finished to convince her. El's mind was blank when she grabbed the musket from the hands of the corpse laid on the stairs in front of the Museum. He was wearing the same kind of hat than the guy on the balcony, she noticed. She fiddled for a bit with the musket, to figure out how it needed to be reloaded with the cell she found on the ground. It wasn't practical at all for her, and she wasn't efficient, but if enemies were far from her she would need the extra range. And if they were close, well, she'd drop it and use her handgun. Foolproof plan of action, right?

Entering the building, she suddenly questioned herself. What was she thinking? Did she have a death wish? Two men were standing on a footbridge overseeing an iron gate separating the entrance in two. She took cover behind a big wooden pillar, but it seemed that the two assailants didn't notice her, concentrating their fire at the back of the atrium, where red rays of energy were shot intermittently by an inside window.  
She leaned out of cover, cranked the musket, and aimed at the back of the man the closest to her, trying to ignore the pain in her shoulder. The shot she took wasn't bad. It was _terrible_. It didn't even graze the raider, and actually almost ended through the windows from which her ally was shooting.

"Well, fuck it then," she said dropping it to the floor and taking her handgun back.

The two men were now aware of her presence and turned in her direction to shoot. Ducking back behind her pillar, she waited for a firing window. The thunder-like sound of a laser musket, followed by a scream of agony, informed her that the man from the balcony was way better than her at handling his weapon. She peeked at the remaining enemy, who was about to be caught in crossed fire, trying to hide from both sides. His attention was mostly directed toward the person who just killed his companion, so she took her chance, aimed, and shot. This time she managed to have a clean shot at his back, thanks to dumb luck, which made him fall on the floor. She saw his weapon slip from his finger and fall on the other side of the gate. She couldn't see him anymore, so she proceeded to the gate, which happened to be closed with chains. The dog barked once as to call her and make her follow him in a corridor on her left.

From there, things got blurry in her mind. It was almost surreal to move around in the recreated decors of the museum, along with a piece of joyful flute music or an informative recording about the revolution, all the while trying to defend herself from unknown men and women trying to kill her. The dog actually continued to save her life in there, as she'd probably have perished at each encounter if he hadn't been there to rip a calf or jump at a throat.  
El was caught in a haze of adrenaline that didn't let her think. She even felt satisfied when she managed to make a perfect headshot on the last raider when he passed the doorway she was waiting behind. It didn't even bother her when his blood splattered her face. The dumb luck she had since she entered the building seemed to have remained with her until the end after all.  
Her heart still racing, she rushed to the door leading to her unknown ally, just at the end of the hallway. She knocked with her fist, not controlling her body, and burst into the room when she heard the lock open on the other side.

* * *

The young woman in front of them wasn't in good shape, to say the least. Her dark long hair was a mess, with blood making some strands stick together. Her face was splattered with the same blood, and her chest had some old dried one on it. The hands holding her gun were shaking, apparently without her notice, and her eyes held a hollow look in them, as she wasn't really there with them. The dog right next to her was in stark contrast, sitting upright, its tail wagging on the ground happily.  
Preston would have been worried for a moment that she was just a raider from another gang than the one who attacked them, but the dog and her blue vault jumpsuit informed him that it wasn't the case. So she was a vault dweller. No surprise that she seemed so out of her element right there.

"Man, I don't know who you are, but your timing is impeccable," he said with a reassuring smile. "Preston Garvey. Commonwealth Minutemen."

He walked slowly toward the woman, careful to not put too much weight on his knee. Damned be those raiders, and damned be their own empty stocks of Stimpaks. He couldn't do much fighting with a leg that had a bullet go through it.  
He waited for an answer, but she just looked at him with wide eyes. He was starting to feel uncomfortable when she responded.

"I'm... I'm Éléanore Jacquet-Jonhson. I... I used to be a lawyer, but I guess now that doesn't really make sense anymore, huh?" she giggled nervously.

"A lawyer you say? That is... unusual these days."

"It is a long story, just... a long story." she sighed

"Wonderful!" spat a woman with dark hair sitting on a stool next to Preston. "We're so doomed that all the help we got is from a girl who's totally out of it, with a job that doesn't exist anymore."

"Calm down Marcy, " said the guy in overalls who had been using a terminal since she entered the room. "I'm Sturges by the way, the 'official tinkerer' of this small group of ours. Don't mind Marcy here, she'd always been a bit... caustic."

"Sorry to ask this but... um, who are you all actually?" asked El, raising a hand to her forehead. She was feeling dizzy.

There were five people in the room: Preston, Sturges, Marcy, an old woman sitting on a wobbly couch, and a man sitting on one of their sleeping bags, his head between his knees. Preston introduced the last two as being respectively Mama Murphy and Jun Long, Marcy's wife. The two seemed to be quite the example of 'opposites attracts'.

"They're just folks looking for a new home." Preston continued." A fresh start. I've been with them since Quincy. Lexington looked good for a while, but the ghouls drove us outta there. A month ago, there were twenty of us. Yesterday there were eight. Now, we're five."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, sorry for your loss..." said El, leaning weakly against the doorframe. "Do you, huh... do you mind if I sit for a minute?"

"Of course not! Here you are!" said Sturge, politely giving her his chair in front of the terminal. He half-sat on the desk instead.

"The things you said that drove you all out of Lexington, what are these? Ghuls?" asked El to Preston, after thanking the tinkerer. Her legs were as strong as wet noodles, and it felt like she was witnessing her life happening behind a window.

"Wow, you really aren't from around here, are you? Ghouls are... irradiated people. Most are just like you and me. They look pretty messed up, and live a long time, but they're still just... people. The ones I'm talking about are different. The radiation's rotted their brains. Made them feral. They'll rip you apart, just as soon as look at you."

Great, the young woman thought. This nightmare of mine just needed ravenous human-eating zombies. Perfect, everything is perfect.

"Anyway," was Preston continuing, "we figured Concord would be a safe place to settle. Those Raiders proved us wrong. I counted them, well, their bodies now, and there is still a part of the gang out there to get us. But... well, we do have one idea. Sturges? Tell her."

"There's a crashed vertibird up on the roof. Old school. Pre-war. You might've seen it," seeing her nod, he pursued: "Well, looks like one of its passengers left behind a seriously sweet goody. We're talking a full suit of cherry T-45 Power Armor. Military issue. Buuut... it's outta juice. Probably has been for a hundred years. It can be powered up again, but we're a bit stuck..."

"Yes, cause what it needs is an old pre-war F.C., a standardized Fusion Core." continued Preston. Your high-grade, long-term nuclear battery. Used by the military and some companies, way back when. And we know right where to find one..."

El felt like he was explaining things to a child. She _knew_ what a fusion core was, it was common knowledge how Power Armor worked back in her days. After all, they were the pride of the American Army, and being Nate's wife she had her fair share of someone touting to her about the magnificent pieces of technology each armor was.

"But it's locked behind a security gate in the basement of this museum. I've been trying to hack the terminal that controls it, but no dice. And there's no key lock on these kinds of gate, so we can't lockpick it, not that I'm any good at that either..."

Still listening, El was rummaging in her pack at the same time, looking for the Stimpack she had half-emptied already. Her shoulder was now throbbing, and it felt like it didn't' belong to her anymore.

"Could you help us with that?" asked Sturges.

"What, the terminal? Not really, sorry... But, I don't know... Have you tried "0000"? Or '1234'?"

"I... huh... No, I haven't actually, that'd be surprising to have such an easy password."

Great, now they all thought she was simple-minded. El shrugged.

"As you wish. Haha!"

She finally managed to find what she wanted. Stabbing herself with a used needle wasn't very sanitary, but at least it had been used by her.

"Oh, you have Stimpaks!?" exclaimed Preston. "Would you... would you mind sharing one with me? I've got a pretty nasty shot in my knee, and we're out of medication..."

El realized that she was really out of it, because she hadn't noticed how the man was leaning on his good leg, the other one being rather bloody, and his dark skin was definitely shining because of how sweaty he was. Was he made of stone actually? She was pretty sure she'd be crying in a corner with such a wound. She handed him a Stimpak, and he stuck the needle in his knee without a second thought, sighing in relief.

"Thanks, ma'am. You're a good soul, I can see that."

"Thanks..."

El emptied the rest of her Stimpak in her shoulder, trying to not look at it and at the same time not stick it in her clothes. Needles were still gross.  
Everything still felt blurry around her. Leaning in her chair, she barely realized hat Preston was asking her about why she was in Concord. Sturges left the room at this moment, mumbling something.

"I'm sorry for your loss, that must be terrible to wake up to this."

"Thanks. I just don't feel sad right now, just tired, you know? Kind of empty. I don't even know why I'm telling you all this, you certainly have your own problems."

"What kind of Minuteman would I be if I just ignored someone needing help? Mama Murphy may be able to tell you things if you'd like."

The old woman, quietly petting the dog at her feet, waved at her with a kind edentulous smile, and Marcy scoffed.

"Yeah, introduce our junky senile elder to the lost simple-minded widow!"

"No one asked for your opinion," replied El with anger. She already disliked Marcy. Maybe the woman was right, but being polite never killed anyone.

"Do not mind her, kiddo, " said the old woman with a kind smile. "Her heart hurts, and she just feels like everyone needs to hurt too. I know you are a good person and you can help us. Otherwise, loyal Dogmeat here would not have brought you here. And a helpful person deserves help in return."

So Dogmeat was the name of the brave German Shepherd. Eccentric.

"The Sight might be able to help you, but for now it just hints claws and scales, and I don't have any Jet to see further. You have to be careful, child, because theses claws are coming for you."

"Huh-uh," said El. She wasn't to contradict the old lady's hallucinations. Pretty sure it'd only make her dementia worse.

Sturges entered back in the room, a fusion core in his hands, and seemingly in a rush.

"I can't believe you were right about the password, it was '1234'! But we're gonna have problems soon, I peeked at the windows of the first floor, and it seems that the remaining raiders are gathering at the end of the street."

* * *

"You're gonna get killed and you know it."

On the roof, a fresh breeze blowing on her face, Dogmeat at her side even if she didn't ask him to come, El smashed the fusion core in the back of the Power Armor. She did it without precaution, almost hoping it would break the charging circuits and stop her from walking towards her death. But it went all the way in, and she heard a beep, probably indicating that it wasn't out of juice anymore.

"You don't know how these things work, you just had Nate praise about how intuitive Power Armors were, and how powerful and invulnerable you feel in them. Even with his messed up joint, you can be sure that Preston would have done better than you. And yet you let yourself get convinced that the Stimpak wasn't quick enough, and that he could just cover you from the balcony. Even if it's true that his aim with his laser-thingy is better than yours."

She turned the valve at the back of the armor, like she had seen in those ads for the army back when TV ads were still a thing. The back of the metal shell opened widely, and she stepped in. Fortunately, she was tall enough to see something through the helmet, because it was definitely not designed with petite people in mind. As soon as she slid her hands and feet where they belonged, the armor closed back, and the yellow hud of the helmet turned on.

"Not the moment to develop claustrophobia, right Dogmeat?"

Her voice sounded metallic, and the dog tilted his head on the side, curious. She had left her backpack in the room with the others, and just took a Stimpak, her gun and some ammo with her. No way the straps of her pack would fit around her huge shoulders right now, and all her belongings couldn't fit in the small compartments of the armor.  
She took a few awkward steps, discovering how loud she was with this. Ripping off the minigun from the crashed vertibird as Sturges suggested to her, she realized how strong she truly was right now. She'd barely be able to drag it on the floor without the added strength of the armor's exoskeleton. Hearing Dogmeat bark, she raised her head and saw a raider on the roof on the other side of the street. He was yelling at his companions down in the street that she was in front of him, armed and armored. A surprising rush of anger flew through her, and she pressed the trigger of the minigun, aiming at the man. It was difficult to point right, but the fire rate was so high that she just had to swipe from left to right in his general direction to turn him into a colander.  
Looking down at the street, she heard bullets pinging uselessly against her, and saw the woman aiming at her just below.  
The raider girl didn't survive the landing of the Power Armor on her head.

"Woohoo!" El shouted, her heart racing after her free fall from the roof.

She didn't acknowledge the human pulp she was walking on. She rushed to the street where the raiders were hiding behind the sandbags, feeling pumped.

It didn't take long for her and Preston to wipe them off. Too easy. El remarked that her armor did take damage, bullets strikes all over it. None of them had reached her body, but feeling invincible made her forget that she actually was inside of this fighting device.  
Her minigun dangling low in her hands, she was slowly apprehending what she had done on this street. She actually yelled from excitement after smashing a human being under her feet. Killing all these people here didn't make her flinch at the moment. She turned around to get back to the museum, feeling heavy.

A sudden explosion a hundred yards behind her made her jump. Apparently, a car had taken a stray bullet, and its reactor didn't take it well. The blow was impressive, even from where she was. She was about to continue on her way when she heard the roar.  
Through the smoke and flames rising from the scattered car pieces, she caught the glimpse of a giant lizard thing, bearing enormous horns on top of its triangular face, and menacing claws a the end of its upper limbs. It roared at the sky, arching its head, then got on all four, apparently looking for something. El felt like she was this something.

"Deathclaw! Run!" shouted Preston. She wasn't going to second-guess his advice.

The armor was almost impossible to run in. El was slow, clanking and clumsy, and the sound of the beast running after her wasn't doing anything to calm her down. The minigun was cumbersome in this situation, but she wasn't going to drop it and then have to face the monster with a handgun. She might be suicidal, but she wasn't stupid.  
Preston's shots were flying over her head, but she wasn't going to check if they reached their target. She wouldn't have time to reach the museum. She took a tight turn and rushed inside a hardware store on her right. There was no way that the thin bay-window frames would slow the colossal lizard down more than a few seconds, so upstairs was her only option.  
At the top of the stairs, El didn't have to wait for long before she heard the sound of a wall crumbling down under the attacks of the monster. It appeared in her field of view and roared again when it saw her. Its giant claws started to dig inside the staircase, making pieces of bricks fall on its scaly hide. Seeing how easily the beast was destroying the walls, her Power Armor wouldn't stand much chance against its arm-long hooks. The mutated lizard's yellow eyes, glowing ferociously, were staring at her, leaving no room for interpretation: if it got to her, she'd be turned into a glorified can of Cram.

The stairs definitely saved her. The giant lizard was laying dead on the pile of rubbles it had created in its vain attempt to get to her. Her half of the staircase was still standing, and she had to jump on the ground floor to get out of the building. Killing the thing emptied her minigun, as the majority of the bullet she shot at him ricocheted, except the ones that got to its belly.  
Outside, she felt the urge to get out of her armor, and struggled to find the exit process. Once she was out, she tripped on her own feet and felt the dizziness come back. The sun was beginning to set, bathing the scenery around her in a warm light. Corpses were littering the street, bend over the sandbags or laid out on their back. The one at her feet was unrecognizable, as her minigun had turned his head into a mush of brain matter and broken bone. A few piles of red ashes, already starting to be dispersed by the wind, and two bodies bearing horrible burns were the proof that Preston did his share of the work. Apart from the lizard. The man wasn't on the balcony anymore, she noted.  
She turned to look at her armor and saw how close to death she brushed past. The rusted metal was now riddled with bullet marks, rendering it almost useless. But its the blood and flesh that spotted the feet of the armor that caught her eyes. The remains of the raider girl she had jumped on as a kid jumps in a puddle.

Everything started to turn around her. She was feeling sick to her stomach.

The group led by Preston exited the Museum just in time to see her faint at the feet of the Power Armor.


	5. San Francisco

The group led by Preston exited the Museum just in time to see her faint at the feet of the Power Armor.

When El opened her eyes, she was staring at a familiar ceiling. She sat up with haste, not grasping at first where she was. Her heartbeat slowed down when she saw the old woman, Mama Murphy, gently staring at her from a timeworn red chair.

"There, there, kiddo. Take your time here, will you? It is not every day that you get the occasion to brag about having defeated a Deathclaw."

El had to wait for her head to stop spinning before being able to talk. She swang her legs out of the couch she had been laid on and pushed the sleeping bag that had covered her to the side.

"How... how did I got here? What happened?"

"Well, Sturges put on the Power Armor you used to save us back in Concord, and carried you all the way to here. At first, we thought about giving it to Preston because of his knee, but we realized that it would make it impossible to fire quickly in case of an emergency. No offense to Sturges, but he is not the best shooter out there."

"I heard that Mama Murphy!" shouted a voice from outside of the house they were in. The Callahans', El realized, her old neighbors across the street. "You should really take into consideration that I'm the best chair builder you ever encountered, and that you can't do without me."

The tinkerer entered the living room where the two women were seated, wiping his hand on a questionably brown rug, that he then stuffed in one of the many pockets of his overalls.

"So, the sleeping hero has awakened now, haven't you?" he continued for El. "Quite the show you gave us back in Concord. Thanks again for saving our asses, if you'll excuse my language. If I just may give you a little tip, it's not recommended to lose consciousness on the battleground after a fight. Safety reasons and everything..."

"I... I don't really know how I did all of this..." whispered El. Oh my gosh, she was seeing the corpses again. "I killed so many people... I'm a murderer now..."

She burst into tears, to Sturges' great surprise.

"Hey, hey... don't cry, you did what you had to do, okay?"

Preston had told him what she had shared about her story when he was gone to take the fusion core. Messed up stuff, could explain the mental break down. Mama Murphy stood, her joints protesting, and went to sit next to the young woman, patting her gently on the back.

"I knew the minute I saw you that you are not in your time. It must be a terrible thing to wake up somewhere you do not belong. But I also saw that you are strong, and brave, and driven. The Sight is clear about that: your path will be tortuous, and harsh, but it will lead you to your goal eventually."

It didn't calm El's nerves, on the contrary. She felt that the old woman was trying to reassure her, but being reassured by hallucinations wasn't what she needed right now.

"Sturges, will you go get some of the water we purified, please? And something to eat for this young lady too."

As he complied, Mama Murphy took the opportunity to explain to El how they arrived here. It wasn't especially said to reassure her, but her poised, almost quavering voice did calm the sobbing woman. At least it wasn't a completely hallucinatory delirium.

They had arrived here the day before, at night. Mama Murphy allegedly knew this place would be a good home for them. Sturges had laid El on the couch, and then everybody took turns to take the watch while she and the others slept. This morning, she was watched over by Mama Murphy while the rest of the group went to gather what could be useful from the neighborhood. Apparently, much to Preston's displeasure, there weren't many useful weapons, but Sturges assured them all that he had everything to build a proper workshop. They even had the time to put up a small cooking station before she woke up.

"We just have to figure what we need to do with that Mr. Handy we found", said Sturges at that moment, reentering the house. "He doesn't obey what we say and keeps on repeating that he only follows the orders from his owners. Maybe I should try to hack it, and if it fails, we may be able to use him for spare parts..."

After convincing Sturges that Codsworth was not to be turned into a source of circuitry, El drank and ate what he brought her. The food was something they called "mutfruit", that Marcy had apparently found behind one of the houses of the neighborhood's house. It looked like a weird mix between an apple and a purple plum but tasted fine, although unusual.

From then, she was seamlessly included in the little group of survivors from the Museum of Freedom. They didn't seem to mind the fact that she was utterly wretched: after all, they had Jun too. They learned on the third night that her husband was still in the Vault top hill. Sturges had been eager to go visit it to see if he could gather some interesting pieces of technology, but Preston had to cool his jets, out of respect for the deads and El. They weren't going to mess with the systems of the Vault before being able to offer a proper inhumation to the victims and they were not going not letting them rot in there, without a way to keep them from decomposing inside their cold caskets.

At the end of the week, the house they had decided to inhabit was looking pretty good. The holes in the walls and roof had been fixed, a small fireplace had been built from an old barrel in the 'communal room', and they had turned the kitchen, the laundry room, and the bathroom into three additional rooms. With the two original rooms of the house, it meant that they all had their own space. Mama Murphy had insisted to get the smaller one because she assured them that the shutters they had put in the other rooms to replace the windows were letting the wind pass through. El wasn't going to object, given that she knew she couldn't sleep in such a small place. It would have been too much like the Vault.

The days were exhausting, and that was all she could ask for. From dusk to dawn, everything was revolving around simple things: eating, building something -the industrial water purifier as Codsworth wasn't productive enough for all of them, the modified laundry machine attached to an old bike, some shelves to put in the house, the future windmill...-, taking care of the plants that Marcy had managed to transplant behind their house, gathering some wood to keep the fire going... They were lucky enough to have found quite a good amount of crops scattered around the neighborhood. They most likely had been growing from what used to be the orchards of Sanctuary, spreading for two hundred years.

At the end of the days, just after dinner, El made an habit out of mending the clothes of her companions, and some new old ones they found in Sanctuary. They all sat in what served as the living room, and she listened to their chatting. She was feeling better, probably.

"You're doing some pretty tight and neat stitches El," had said Preston once, reviewing the long waistcoat she had handed him back, "who taught you to sew like that?"

"It's my mom, a long time ago," had said El with a nostalgic smile and a tear in her eye. "She taught me 'everything a lady should know', or made me take lessons. I always wondered how she and my dad were able to fall in love at one point you know. I mean, they divorced pretty quickly, but still. He was an outdoorsy man, all about being free and not caring what others taught about him, and she was... all the contrary. Meaning that my father couldn't care less about my sewing, and my mother was horrified about the fact I could skin a hare in one fell swoop."

"Speaking about that," said Preston, jumping on the opportunity, "I could use a hand to go hunting tomorrow. Would you mind to come?"

And that is how she left Sanctuary for the second time, but this one accompanied by a friendly human in addition to the friendly dog. She had made Preston promise that they wouldn't attack any human, and he seemed offended to learn that she thought so little of him:

"I'm with the Minutemen, I told you. We're out there to help people, to turn the Commonwealth into a better place. I may very well be the last of them, but that doesn't mean I threw away all my morals. The Minutemen don't kill anyone that doesn't pose a direct threat to innocent people. Feel me?"

She knew she touched a raw nerve there, and apologized. Preston wasn't as funny to work with as Sturges, she'd learn, but he was honorable and genuinely concerned about others.

The hunt went all right. They managed to get two rabbits, without much fur left on them. The three of them also got attacked by a small pack of molerats -the name of the naked giant moles-, but Dogmeat warned them of the danger beforehand, giving them the advantage. Preston assured El that molerats were ok to eat, although a bit hard to chew.

They got back to Sanctuary well before the evening, having also harvested what the Minuteman had called 'siltbean', to allow Marcy to plant some in that garden of hers -it was their garden in theory, but Marcy was definitely the ruler of this little plants kingdom-. Apparently, Mama Murphy knew the recipe of a good bean stew to make from them.

El suspended the rabbits to a pair of hooks and was able to show off her skinning and gutting skills. She was a bit rusty from lack of practice -after all, she had been the perfect girlfriend and wife for the past three years, not giving her many opportunities to maintain such skills-, but she did ok and was pretty proud of herself.

"Is it okay though?" she thought. "I'm out there, being all proud of myself and everything, while Shaun is God knows where. I should be on his tracks..."

She shook her head. The encounter in Concord had shown her that she was not ready to face the dangers on her way. Mama Murphy had told her that, even without using her 'sight' she could tell her that she should look for clues about her son in 'Diamond City'. Given the directions the old woman offered her, it was probably at the heart of Boston, around twenty-five miles away from Sanctuary. It meant at least eight hours of walking if she could do it in one go, and it was unlikely.

"You're no going to help Shaun if you're dead on the side of the street, beheaded by a deathclaw or robbed then killed by raiders," she whispered to herself. "You stay here, you learn the ropes, you make sure you didn't forget anything Papa taught you, and then you'll think about hitting the road."

"You said something, El'?" asked Sturges, who was skinning the molerats a few feets away from her.

"No no, don't worry, just talking to myself."

"Heh, I can't blame you. It's not like you were standing next to the greatest joker of all times, who could entertain you with his admirable puns."

"Sturges, please..." she pretended to whine.

"What do you call someone with no body and no nose?"

"Sturges..."

"Nobody knows."

"That's it, I'm leaving," she rolled her eyes but didn't try to stop herself from smiling.

"Come on, that was a good one!"

She pretended to throw the guts of the rabbit she had just opened to his face, making him protest:

"And here is how this great genius of mine got crushed by the unstoppable wheel of censorship..."

"Yeah yeah, you're going to make me cry. In the meantime, the crushing wheel of censorship that I am is going to wash herself. Good luck with your molerat. At least it doesn't have to listen to you," she teased him.

The lavatories were spartan, to say the least. The toilets were an outhouse because, as Marcy had told her contemptuously, they were not going to flush perfectly fine fertilizer down the river. El could understand that but had still a hard time adapting to this. As for the washing part, there was no way they were going to purify enough water to take a shower, let alone a bath. And as bathing in water filled with radioactive particles wasn't recommended either, every one had his own recycled washcloth and a quarter of a bucket of water for the whole body.

She had gotten used to the smell sooner than she expected. Maybe the human fertilizer had made her take things into perspective.

Three days after, Preston, Dogmeat and her were on hunting duty again. After all, Marcy had informed everyone that as winter was going to be there soon, the crops wouldn't give as much, and they should make stocks of smoked meat.

They had traveled deeper south than usual, and they spotted in the distance the outline of a manmade structure, built around the base of a high voltage pylon. El promptly tried to go back, to avoid engaging any raiders.

"Wait, I heard of this place," said Preston, grabbing her by the wrist. "A building around a pylon, with apparently crops in front of it? They are not raiders. They had asked help from Minutemen a few years ago. When we... when we still meant something."

Crops? El squinted her eyes. Could it be...?

"Oh my... I know this place, this was called the Cucurbit Farm. That's where my... my husband and I went to pick our Halloween pumpkins a few days before... well, before. You're sure they're not raiders?"

Preston made them move closer to the farm, and when he saw the people there attend to their crops, he answered in the affirmative. No raiders would dress like that or take care of properly of a farm, supposedly.

That's how they met the Abernathy's on their farm.


	6. C'est dit

That's how they met the Abernathy's on their farm.

Blake Abernathy was a simple man, proud of his farm and wary of raiders. His wife, Connie, was tough and didn't like to bargain about the price of her produce: although he tried, Preston didn't manage to buy her gourds shoots at less than fifteen caps the piece. El still didn't understand why those Nuka-Cola caps were used as money, as it was cumbersome and jingling all the time, but apparently, it wasn't weird to the others. And to think that the first time she heard about it she thought it was another lame joke from Sturges...

She had found, back at Sanctuary, a small caps stash hidden underneath a couch. The others had told her to keep it, as they all had a bit of money already. She looked through what Connie had to sell but didn't find anything she could use. She was desperately looking for a new pair of shoes, as the one going with her vault suit had been thought for indoorsy activities.

"You're quite tall for a gal, y' know?" said Connie. "No surprise you don't fit in my Mary's old boots."

El had indeed noticed that she was pretty tall now, even amongst the men. She'd never been small, but it wouldn't be surprising that the likely malnutrition and mild but constant radiation poisoning had hindered the growth of everyone in the wastelands. That and the lack of hormones fed meat in the daily diet, too...

"Oh, your daughter must be tall too then?" asked El, eager to make small talk.

"She's dead."

"Oh shit," said El, out loud. Very tactful, she berated herself. "I'm... I'm sorry for your loss."

She shivered at the idea that this woman was now selling her daughter's old possessions. It was yet another reminder of how their life was different than what she knew. They needed to eat, and people died, so if what those people used to have could bring food to the livings' plates, then so be it.

El realized that the sadness that those farmers had tried to conceal wasn't hiding so far, and she felt terrible for making them remember their dead daughter. Connie led her and Preston outside of the small shack leaning against their main building that served as her shop. Her expression was still stern, but the two companions couldn't ignore the aura of grief surrounding her.

"You... you said you were with the Minutemen, right?" asked Blake when he saw his wife returning to their crops.

"Yes, we are," replied Preston, ignoring El's puzzled look at this affirmation. "There's not much of us left out there, but we still do our best to help our fellow wasteland inhabitants."

"Then, I have something to ask you, if that's not too much..."

* * *

"Are you crazy?"

El, Preston and Dogmeat were heading back to Sanctuary, the day had progressed too much to try to hunt on the way. Not like any of the two humans were in the mood for quietly preying on a rabbit, or a radstag if they were lucky.

"Preston! Answer me!"

"I thought you were one of the good ones, " he finally dropped with disappointment, stopping a few feets in front of her, and turning in her direction. "When I explained to you what the Minutemen were, you seemed to think we were acting for a good cause, you seemed to be eager to help. And now that we could start to make a difference out there again, take the first step into becoming the Commonwealth's hope for stability, you withdraw and you let these helpless people on their own..."

"But who do you think I am?" she spat, her voice almost trembling. "I'm no hero, never pretended to be! I was a fucking lawyer, remember? Une putain d'avocate! Of course, I think you're doing something good with these... these Minutemen of yours! But did you even bother asking me to join? No, you just assumed it, without even wondering if I felt up to it: and guess what? I don't! I'm not a survivor like all of you, and I'm not a good samaritan like you, Preston! I don't farm like Marcy, I don't tinker like Sturges, I don't have an... an alleged superpower like Mama Murphy, and I can't cook drugs and medicine as Jun do! Most of all, I never learned how to survive in this place like you all did: what my father taught me was a... a joke compared to the real-life I've been thrown in. I already have next to no chances to ever find my son again... So don't get mad because I said no to your face in front of them!" she finished, her voice eventually broken.

"These people have a broken family too! Did you even saw the looks on their faces when you said that? You broke their hopes to ever see their heirloom again and properly grieve for their daughter," Preston stiffly replied. His anger was cold and refrained, while El's was blazing with all her sadness and despair.

"I saw them, and yes it's sad, but I'm not risking my life to get it back for them! I'm not going to kill more people just for a stupid silver locket!"

"A stupid locket?" scoffed Preston. "Would you speak like that about that 'stupid ring' you can't stop twisting around your finger?"

El froze instantly, as did Preston when he realized what had just slipped out of his mouth.

"Listen, El... I'm sorry, I didn't mean..."

"Yes, you meant it, Garvey. You meant it."

Holding back her tears, she passed next to him in a rush, in direction of Sanctuary. Hearing him calling her and beginning to jog in her trail, she started to run to escape from his voice, Dogmeat on her heels.

He was right. He was so fucking right. How could she pretend to do what Nate would have done if she wasn't even going to help her fellows? And she was right too. She was useless. So yes she could sew, and skin a rabbit, and hit a target one time out of two. But what else? And she thought she could save Shaun? She wasn't kidding anyone. Run. Run faster. That's all she was good at. She wasn't even hearing Preston anymore, and her legs were carrying her, emptying her mind from the superfluous.

It took her just a bit more than half an hour to get back to Sanctuary. She wasn't sprinting anymore, but she didn't stop running either. A small group of bloatflies had tried to attack her on the way but quickly renounced, seeing that El was definitely running faster than they could fly, and away from their territory. She was out of breath and was definitely going to be sore the day after. Jun, who was of guard duty at this moment, saw her cross the bridge of Sanctuary with only Dogmeat after her. He asked her where Preston was, but she ignored him.

She dropped the few gourd's shoots she was carrying in Marcy's hand, ignoring her questions as well. They had suffered a bit from her running, but with luck and good care, they would grow eventually. Despite her PipBoy indicating that it was only 6PM, she went to lock herself in her room. Sturges and Mama Murphy went to knock on her door and ask her if everything was fine, but she didn't reply anything more than she was not feeling ok and needed space.

"You're acting like a bloody teenager who's been grounded," she mumbled. "Sulking in your room won't turn you into the survivor you need to be..."

She needed to become tougher. It was what she needed to find Shaun and she had told herself she would find him or die trying already. Now she just had to walk the walk, right? But for now, she just felt like being alone and self-recriminate.

The morning after, she exited her room before the others awoke. Preston had tried to apologize through her door the night before, but she had just ignored him. Why make things easier and accept heartfelt apologies, right? She was behaving like a lunatic, and that bothered even her.

El exited the house, and stopped on the sidewalk, breathing in the wet smell of the morning dew. She was still exhausted, even after having slept at her heart's desire: she knew she was having some bad dreams regularly, but they faded away as soon as she opened her eyes, leaving her only with a sense of guilt and grief. The fact that no one came to wake her up for her watch turn made her feel even more guilty.

On the roof of the house was a small watch shed, accessible by a makeshift stairway. There, El found Sturges, who was ending his shift. As soon as he saw her get on the roof, he smiled and patted the small spot next to him on the bench that occupied almost all the room under the shed's roof. He was wearing the old winter coat they all shared when taking the watch, to protect himself against the crisp night.

She sat in silence next to him, and let her gaze drift upon Sanctuary, coated in mist. It still looked dilapidated, but she knew what had changed already. The completely crumbled down house next to their's had been almost entirely turned into scrap pieces to patch their walls and create makeshifts furniture and shutters. Now, at this place, was standing the almost completed windmill Sturges was so proud of. She remembered the day he asked her to gather all the wires she could find in Sanctuary and stack them in his workshop, which was taking up all the space of what used to be the Able's parking spot. She had felt like it would never end, but the enchanted look on Sturge's face when he started to include her findings in his creation made it worth it.

"Are you all right?" asked Sturges, who was also looking at their small settlement.

"Meh."

"Such a long-winded answer, you should let me a few minutes to process it."

El just smiled sadly as a response.

"You know," the man in the overall continued, "in my youth, when I wasn't at Quincy yet, I always felt useless."

"In your youth? Come on, your not yet at the grandpa stage of your life..."

"Glad to see there is still someone behind that thick coat of self-depreciation. Anyhoo, in my youth, as I said, I just had no purpose in life. I come from a small settlement south of Quincy, around a four hours walk from it. Brok-Town it was called. It seemed like a ghost settlement, with people only passing through, not staying for too long. The young me found it quickly boring, and I left for Quincy, convinced that I was going to go through life in the dull way I was used to, but at least I was going to discover new places. Then, there, I met Old Tony..." he paused his story, glancing at El.

"Old Tony?" she repeated, eager to learn more. The voice and tone of Sturges were perfect for telling stories, at least to her ears.

"Good, you're paying attention. I'd have been very offended otherwise. Might even have given you 'the look'..."

"The look?"

"It is my most trusty weapon of mass shaming. Beware of its power if you ever ignore my great storytelling, of mess with my carefully tidied workbench."

She laughed softly at his self-mockery. For all his tinkering genius, Sturges was notoriously messy and disorganized, his workbench regularly disappearing under a pile of scraps and blueprints.

"So, Old Tony. He was an old guy -what a surprise, right?-, at least 60, and when we first met he was already turning blind. He taught me everything I know. Well, at the beginning he basically turned me into his personal servant, making me gather scraps for him, handing him his tools, taking care of the small pieces he wasn't capable of seeing clearly anymore... He took a great pleasure calling me a "clumsy hoodlum", too. Definitely a stringent teacher: it took me a while to realize that he was trusting me more and more, because he never told me. He just let me tinker more and more accordingly, on more important pieces. When he left us... ahem... when he left us, he gave me his welding goggles," he said, pointing the protectives glasses that were always around his neck. "And he told me that I was the best clumsy hoodlum he ever taught to."

"I'm sorry for your mentor," El tried comforting him, his cracking voice resonating in her. "It seems he was a perceptive man because you're definitely one of a kind."

"Don't feel bad for me about his death. Even if it still feels weird to think about him being gone, it was a long time ago and it was better for him, his cancer had spread too much and he was in almost constant pain. Anyway, I wasn't telling you all these to make you even sadder, which isn't very obvious now that I think about it. It's just that Old Tony helped me find my path, he helped me becoming someone who matters out there. That brought a new kind of light in my life. We all have our calling. It's not because you don't find it right away that it's not out there waiting for you. No one in his right mind would ask you to behave like the perfect wasteland survivor or vigilante for that matter. And who knows? Maybe in a few years, you'll be at the head of the Commonwealth's largest haute couture business. Or largest tannery."

She laughed again, and this time her smile reached her eyes.

"C'mon, give old Sturges here a ladylike cuddle for the best therapy session you ever had."

He patted himself on the shoulder, and she laid her head on it, thanking him. They both watched the sun rise fully over the line of the horizon, and heard their fellow settlers wake up underneath them.

Life went on in their small community. No one spoke about what happened between Preston and El, and the two of them pretended everything was fine. Nonetheless, the young woman still felt the disappointment in the Minuteman's eyes, when he thought she wasn't paying attention. The way he spoke at dinner time felt artificial, and that lasted a whole other week.

By that time, the windmill was completed, and it felt like a pure luxury to all of them. Their living space was now lit at night if needed, and they had a proper water purifier, so they didn't have to go through the tedious process of purifying water over the fire, and Codsworth was finally able to go about his business, instead of hovering in a corner and using his energy to turn humidity into drinking water. Sturges and El went on a scavenging mission in the west of Concord, bringing back new scrap pieces for his new project: a recruitment beacon to expand their little community.

It was their second scavenging trip together: the first one had brought pieces to fix a radio, a few intact lightbulbs -they were such a pain in the ass to carry around-, old curtains to insulate the windows in prevision for the beginning of December, and some Pre-War preserved food. It also had been the first time that El had used the radio on her PipBoy, to listen to the 'Diamond City Radio'. The selection of songs wasn't the widest, but it gave a road-trippy feel to their long walk from and back to Sanctuary. They even had brought two bottles of Nuka-Cola and leftovers of Mama Murphy's stew to serve as their picnic.

Sturges was as much a decent shooter with a handgun as El was: they weren't the greatest, but the few dogs and bloatflies they encountered weren't too much of a challenge. El did earn a new scar on her calf, where a mongrel had bit her before Sturges ended its life, but the vodka and Stimpak did wonders once again. It still hurt like hell to disinfect her wounds, but at least this time she had someone to insult to ease the pain.

"Sanctuary is true to its name, you know?" had told Sturges. "Back at Quincy, ghouls and raiders were much more of a problem than here. Maybe because it was more densely populated before the war, and the survivors went where they thought they'd have more resources to survive? Anyway, it's such a breeze to scavenge here."

When they returned at their settlement that evening, they were both pretty proud of themselves: they had found everything they needed for the beacon, and El had managed to take a lucky shot at a rabbit that crossed their path on the way back.

But the moment they saw the concerned look on Jun's face, they knew something was wrong.

"Preston isn't with you guys?" he asked with his usual anxious tone.

"No, not at all... Why?"

"He...left two hours ago, saying he was...going to meet you at Concord to see if you needed help bringing back heavy stuff... Oh my goodness, something happened to him on the way, and he couldn't reach you... Oh my..."

El's heart sank in her chest. She knew in her gut Preston never intended to come to meet Sturges and her on the way. He had been so distant for the past week, she should have known he wouldn't stop dwelling about the Abernathys.

"Two hours ago you said?" she asked Jun, who nodded. She dropped her package on the ground, emptying it from it's oh so precious scrap, and rushed to their house to pack more ammo and medicine. Time wasn't on her side for this.

Preston was probably already at the USAF Satellite Station Olivia, trying to recover that silver locket.


	7. C'est une belle journée

Preston was probably already at the USAF Satellite Station Olivia, trying to recover that silver locket.

She blurted these explanations to the four other inhabitants of Sanctuary Hills, while rapidly checking her backpack one last time. She didn't need much apart from things to shoot and things to heal. She palmed a little glass jar of Buffout pills, hesitated for a moment, and packed them alongside her Med-X syringe and Stimpaks. If boxers had found it useful to smash their opponents' faces and get their faces smashed for three hours straight, she could find it useful after running the roughly twelve kilometers that separated Sanctuary from the USAF station.

"You stay there, you keep an eye opened for Preston if I was wrong and he comes back, and another eye opened for potential raiders following him!"

Her heart was racing, and she felt the beginning of an adrenaline rush. Checking on her PipBoy -which indicated that she was indeed under a good amount naturally produced stimulant-, she calculated quickly: if Preston was walking at a reasonable pace, he was probably half an hour away from the station. El, for her part, couldn't run as fast as she was able to before getting pregnant. If nothing wrong happened on the way, it would almost take an hour and a half to get there. Cynically she noted that it was a good thing, after all, that Preston insisted that the Abernathy's marked the station on her PipBoy's map, despite the tantrum she'd thrown back there.

No time to think. She started running, crossing the bridge the other way around, Dogmeat following her without her even calling him. The four settlers of Sanctuary had all asked her plenty of questions, and Marcy had even surprisingly tried to stop her by catching her by the arm. Her words of reason were coated in her usual indignation, but El did feel something more behind it. Maybe concern for her safety? It may have been her imagination, but it still felt inexplicably good, somehow.

But El was determined. She didn't see herself doing something else than rushing after Preston.

"Be careful! And you better come back in one piece, or I'll make you regret it!" she heard Sturges shout at her back. It would have made her smile if his voice hadn't gone broken at the end.

A few minutes after, her mind had gone blank, apart from the sound of the wind at her ears and the vibrations of her strides in her body.

* * *

She had been lucky on the way: apparently, Preston had cleared it for her, meaning that he also had opted for a straight line to the east at the exit of Sanctuary, crossing sparse wood and a few dilapidated countryside roads. She stumbled first on four dead mongrels covered in laser burns, then on three feral ghouls corpses. It was the first time that she saw some, and she had to refrain a disgusted gasp at their horribly rotten, almost molten looking skin. Their smell was as nauseating as their hairless bodies and faces, a mix between rotten flesh and putrid human wastes. El gagged, not daring to look at them any longer. She felt bad for the still human-inside ghouls that her companions mentioned to her. To be faced with such decay in one's body must be a horrible fate.

El used this small break to, after stepping away from the irradiated creatures, check her position on her PipBoy. The satellite location system was still working, which was a miracle -well, apart from the fact she knew that nuclear energy powered satellites were supposed to last a thousand years in space: "America's finest technology, watching over you for centuries!"- , and indicated that she wasn't far away from her goal.

Indeed, after getting at the top of the uphill trail she found the ghouls on, she saw the USAF station, maybe half a kilometer away, on its own little knoll. The cloudy weather wasn't really helping her assess the situation, and the wind was going in the wrong direction for her to hear if something was going on up there. She decided that if she wanted a little chemical help, it was now or never, given that it probably wouldn't start working right away. Well, she had actually no idea about how drugs worked, but she figured as much.

The Buffout pill looked like the kind that dissolves under the tongue, like a thin orange powder compressed into a two-millimeter thick square. The taste in her mouth was absolutely not thrilling, and the pill quickly turned into a weird orange paste at the contact of her saliva. Yuk. Now she was thirsty.

When she arrived closer to the station, she crouched instinctively and tried to emit as little noise as possible during her progression. She felt almost silly, like a kid playing at war. But soon, she realized that no one, in the makeshift shack leaning against the huge parabola concrete foundations, was going to hurt her. A corpse with a laser burn on the shoulder was laying on the ground next to the shack, but the man hab more likely been killed by the fifteen meters high fall he suffered, given how his head now looked only held by the skin around his neck and not the spine anymore. The shot Preston had taken had probably made him tumble over the railing of the maintenance platform going around the huge antenna.

At the entrance of the shack, she found a small pile of ashes, still faintly glowing red. At this sight, her heartbeat sped up again. Preston had taken more time than she thought to reach Olivia Station. Seeing that he was not here anymore and that the shack wasn't containing any silver locket, it only meant that El was going to have to enter the basement of the station: she had seen the door through the broken windows of the concrete operation room attached at the bottom of the foundation.

On the other side of the door, she heard some shuffling down the stairs, and Dogmeat started to growl, his ears pressed back on his head. Forgetting any sense of caution, she rushed downstairs, her trusty 10mm gun aiming in front of her. She heard a thump, and a dog squealed. Then, the gunfire began, ballistic weapon starting first.

"Argh!"

"Preston!" she whimpered.

Before she could reach the bottom of the stairs, the thunder-like sound of Preston's musket had blasted three times, and the silence had fallen again underground.

On the cement floor, crawling to go hide behind a desk, she found Preston, clenching his thigh with a grimace of pain. Next to him was a dead mongrel, with its head smashed by the butt of the Minuteman's weapon, and at the end of the room, she saw a pile of glowing red ashes. Another raider arrived and aimed at the Minuteman. Without thinking, El emptied her charger in his direction. He fell on the ground, and she berated herself for this habit of emptying her magazine each time she was taken by surprise. Her ammo wouldn't last long like that.

Preston heard her shoot, and he let go of his thigh to point at her with his musket instinctively. But when he saw her face, his weapon dropped immediately, as well as his jaw.

"Eleanore? What are you doing here?" he whispered, half surprised and, what the young woman found insulting, half angry.

"Je m'appelle Éléanore, for God's sake. There's a reason I insist that everybody should call me El. Pas de ma faute si vous autres Américains êtes incapables de prononcer les 'é' et les 'r' correctement," she mumbled for herself.

"What are you doing here? It's dangerous!" Preston insisted.

"No shit... I thought you went here to play at having a tea party," she took a Stimpak out one of her duster's pocket and stabbed Preston's thigh with it before he could protest. "We'll talk later, okay. For now, your hosts seem to have noticed you killed their puppy and one of their friends."

El was feeling like she was split in half. Her body was pulsing with a renewed energy that couldn't be only the Buffout -right?-, and part of her mind was thrilled to be kind of a savior, on top of feeling as strong as she did. The other part of her mind was desperately trying to convince her to escape from this basement as fast as she could, and that she was not measuring up to a gang of raiders. She didn't listen to this part. She was feeling exhilarated, and reloading her gun gave her a surprising amount of satisfaction.

Preston had barely the time to tell her that he had no Stimpaks left before a raider showed up in the room where they were, probably to see what caused the shuffled he had hears from deeper in the basement. The desk they had managed to get behind was barely wide enough to hide the two humans and the dog, but it did okay. El didn't wait for the raider to aim for them, and shot him. Well, three bullets ended up in the wall behind him, but the one that managed to get through his skull was enough anyway. El was lucky that the room wasn't too big and the raider not too cautious.

It took them almost an hour to clear the first part of the basement. Preston had now a fresh patch of skin on what was the bullet hole in his thigh, and just a hole in his hat by way of a new wound. Dogmeat was fine, even though he received a kick in the ribcage before the raider he had attacked tripped under his weight and had his throat ripped from his neck. El, on her side, wasn't doing so fine, even if she didn't realize it. A nasty bruise was forming on her left cheekbone -she hadn't managed to avoid the kick from one of the raider's pipe pistol-, and a bullet had just a bit more than grazed her flank. Preston had agreed that they should keep their last two Stimpaks for worse wounds than that, but didn't refrain from expressing his discontent:

"You could have avoided these by thinking before acting! We won't survive this if you don't take your time..."

She didn't answer. She felt fine, just concentrated on the next door to go through. What a simple objective it was. Not complicated, not needing preparation, or investigation, or facing the fact that she was probably already chasing her son's corpse because she took too long trying to turn into a true survivor. Just the double door a few meters away from her, closed, through which the last raider was taunting them to come and get her. Simple, clear.

"My name's Ack-Ack! Remember that, so ya can bring it to your filthy grave! Come for me bastards! Come for my minigun so I can turn you into shreds!"

"She has a minigun?" whispered Preston. "Stupid of her to admit that, but that complicates things. No wonder why she doesn't come for us. She's just waiting for us to open the door, and then she has all the firing window she wants to turn us into a couple of strainers."

They were undercover at each side of the short hallway leading to the door, him and Dogmeat to the left, and El to the right. The rest of the basement was cleared, including the big technical room in which they found a couple of fusion cores and enough old terminals, consoles, and toolkits to turn Sturges into the happiest of men. The door was slightly opened, just enough to tell them it wasn't locked, but not enough for them to see their enemy behind it.

"Hey, Ack-Ack!" El shouted, raising to stand in the middle of the corridor. "Why don't _you_ come and get us?! I bet that you're shitting your pants right now, huh? Get out of your hideout, espèce de petite pute! Sors de là, qu'on se marre! Je pisse sur toi et ton gang d'enculés! Tes sales raclures de potes méritaient de crever comme des chiens, et tu vas les rejoindre! Come out, you bitch!"

Preston didn't understand the middle of her diatribe, but the meaning was clear nonetheless. Before he could tell El to get back undercover, the door slammed open, revealing a broad-shouldered woman with ridiculous dirty-blonde pigtails. She roared in fury and started showering the hallway with bullets from her automatic weapon. The Minuteman saw El duck as quickly as she could behind the wall, but not quickly enough, her shriek of pain not covered by the deafening minigun.

The raider was approaching dangerously them, still firing, and Preston tried to convince himself that he'd have more chances of surviving if he tried to shoot her now, rather than waiting to be completely exposed when she'll eventually reach his side of the wall. El was kneeling a few feet away from him, both of them separated by the bullets flying out of the corridor. When he saw what she had in her hand, he grabbed Dogmeat by the collar and moved away from her, ignoring the dog's whimpers of protest. Was she crazy?! The raider was way too...

The explosion of the Molotov cocktail interrupted his thoughts, and the screams that rose from behind him were terrifying. He turned around after the blast ended, and what he saw on the other side of the corridor clenched his gut. El was rolling on the floor, the right part of her hair on fire, trying desperately to extinguish it with her arms. Preston peeked at where the raider stood before, just to see that the burning human form twitching on the floor wasn't a menace anymore. He ran to El and finished putting out the fire with the bottom of his coat.

"Oh my goodness... Hang on, El."

* * *

"It hurts..." she said. At least she tried, only to be able to let out a weak mewl.

"Shhhh, I know, I know, don't... don't move."

She couldn't have, even if she wanted. Her abdomen felt like someone had gutted her alive, the burning pain was unbearable. On the contrary, her right ear, jaw, and temple felt abnormally cold. But it didn't hurt. She tried to reach her face with her fingers, but the pain from her stomach stopped her.

"No, no, don't move..."

She heard a dog whimper and felt a tear run from the corner of her eye to the ground where she was laying. Something stabbed her in the gut, and she screamed.

"That was the first Stimpak. I think there are still some bullets in you, but I... I can't take them out now. Hold on."

She felt someone roll up her sleeve -who was he already?-, and something nip at the crook of her elbow. After a few heartbeats, she found herself diving into a cotton-like sensation. That felt better.

"The Med-X's in. Now it's gonna hurt, I'm sorry."

It couldn't hurt more than that she thought, before feeling two strong hands grabbing her, one at the top of her head and one on her right shoulder. The man turned and pulled her head away from her shoulder, and she felt like her skin was being torn apart. She squealed and tried to wrestle him, but she was too weak to pose a threat. He blocked her head with his knee, and she felt like he was stabbing her face with huge needles, one stab at a time. She was sobbing and begging him internally to stop, tears flowing out of her eyes. She heard the dog whimpered again at her screams, and she blacked out.

...

She was laid on her back, on some very uncomfortable moving cot. It felt like she was on a bunch of tree branches and someone was dragging her bed, making her shake up and down. Her face hurt, her abdomen hurt, and she was so weak. Her lids blinked a few times, then closed.

...

A man was holding her hand, telling her something. Nate? Nathan? Her throat was so dry, and her hand so weak she couldn't even hold his back. She heard him pop a jar open, a sound that she had already heard but couldn't remember where, and he drank something. Then he stood and her bed started shaking again. She fell back into the darkness.

...

The man next to her shouted at someone and moments after she felt her bed being picked up from the ground and carried by other people. She felt like she needed to tell something to the man, but she didn't know what. The swinging motion of her cot would have probably made her sick if it wasn't for her unconsciousness.

...

Someone was digging in her belly when she half-awoke again. She tried escaping, but she was pinned to a table by the wrists and ankles, held down by two persons.

"She's awake!" a woman at her feet shouted. "Stop... stop moving godammit!"

El tried to scream, but her wide-opened mouth only let silence out. She attempted to arch her back to get away from the thing that was exploring her insides.

"We're out of Med-X anyway, so hold her tight!" replied a man, groaning in concentration. "I'm almost there... Yes, I caught it! Preston, gimme the Stimpak!"

She felt a familiar pinch at several places on her abdomen, and the weird itching sensation of the Stimpak's action began. The people holding her released her limbs, and she let out a weak wail, her eyes closed firmly as if it could protect her from the pain she had felt. She didn't even have the strength to roll to her side.

A callous hand that smelled like metal and oily lubricant came to rest on her left cheek, and she heard a familiar voice whisper:

"You've been very brave, El. You are indeed a survivor. He told us what you did."

_Papa? Ne t'en va pas, reste, j'ai besoin de toi. Il faut que tu m'aides, va chercher Nathan. Va le chercher, et va chercher Shaun. Vous êtes meilleurs que moi, moi je dois... je dois dormir. Et après je vous retrouverai, et on mangera des chamallows autour du feu de camp, comme quand j'avais douze ans. Je suis sûre que Shaun aimera ça quand il sera grand. Papa et Nate t'apprendront à faire du feu, et à chasser, et à faire de mauvaises blagues pour me faire rire. Quand je me réveillerai... Promis..._

* * *

The five settlers of Sanctuary Hill took turns at her bedside for four days before she woke up.


	8. Il changeait la vie

The five settlers of Sanctuary Hill took turns at her bedside for four days before she woke up.

She didn't wake up right away. It started with her eyes opening for a few minutes, not really integrating what was happening around her, lost in her numbness, but she was definitely out of the febrile stage of the first three days. Then, during the afternoon, she talked to Jun -who was sitting next to her, busy sharpening a knife-, making him jump in surprise.

"Hey..." she croaked more than anything. "D'you have some water?"

"Oh... Yes! Yes!" he rushed to the kitchen and brought her an old beer bottle filled with purified water. "I'm... I'm gonna call the others, okay?"

He helped her to sit straight in her bed and ran outside, where she heard him call everyone. It didn't take long before her room was packed with her fellow settlers. Seeing their worried faces, she tried to crack a joke.

"What's with the gloomy faces? It's not like I almost died or anything..."

Sturges and Mama Murphy smiled nervously, Marcy rolled her eyes in irritation, Jun started bitting his thumbnail. Preston, for his part, crouched next to her and sighed, looking at the ground. When he lifted his gaze to meet hers, she saw he was truly concerned. Weirdly, she felt fine. She was exhausted, of course; the vague recollections she had of the last few days were painful, to say the least; and her head itched like crazy and was kinda cold. Apart from that... El was surprisingly calm right now. She felt so _alive_, so much _there._

"You brushed past very close to death actually, El. Everyone was worried. The lack of a doctor here didn't really play in your favor, and Jun couldn't do... as much as he wished."

"Jun?" she asked turning to look at the timid man, not realizing that her startled tone may have been offensive. He ran his hand through his hair, and stuttered:

"I... I used to tend to the drugs and chems shop back... in Quincy. When some really... beaten down guy would be brought at the... at the doctor's door, the doc would use me as kind of a... anesthe... anesthesiologist. I... kinda learned some stuffs from there. And... well, removing two bullets from someone's belly isn't rocket science. You were lucky that only two got... got stuck in you. But... but it's Preston that saved you, y' know. I... didn't do much... He did good with your face and neck y' know."

It must have been the longest speech El ever heard from Jun. She felt bad for the opinion she had about the man: even through his stutter and unsure discourse, she could feel how genuinely happy he was to have helped her. Borderline proud of himself. But...

"My face and neck?" she asked, raising her fingers to scratch the itch that hadn't stopped. Her suspicion that something was wrong was confirmed when Preston grabbed her wrist.

"You... you should not scratch that. That may still be fragile..."

"What? What's the matter?" She hoped her voice didn't sound as desperate as she felt it was.

Mama Murphy exited the room and brought a small mirror back. Ok, là ça pue. Seeing her reflection, El almost gasped.

The whole bottom right part of her skull was completely bald, for a start. Her once long brown hair was now a mess: seeing her left profile, one could think nothing was wrong, but the more the hair strands were close to the blad part, the shorter and messier they looked.

And, where the skin was hairless started the scar. She could barely cover it with her two hands next to each other. It was circling her ear, tan-ish and white, carving weird convolutions where her soft skin used to be. The pinna of her ear looked dented on the edge and was smaller than the left one. When she touched her jaw, it felt like some kind of wet cardboard paper, and she noticed that some kind of greasy substance has been smeared on to her face.

She had been the kind of woman who took pride in looking polished, before everything. Never been a model, but could look decent with a bit of makeup and the right outfit. Now, her old preoccupations about beauty seemed awfully shallow. Of course, it bruised her ego a bit, but between that and being dead... An awkward silence was hanging in the room, as they were apparently waiting for her reaction.

"Well..." she started, before clearing her voice. "Well, here goes my chance of being elected Miss Massachusetts, I guess..."

"I'm sorry," began Preston, "I couldn't manage to do much better at first aid. And, well, I know that stretching the skin is horribly painful, and I hoped it would have turned better."

So her memory of him pinning her head down and trying to rip her skin apart -at least it was what it felt like- wasn't some fabulation from her suffering mind. Seeing her interrogative look, he explained himself.

"I learned that seeing people getting healed for laser burns: Stimpaks are great, but they make the healing process almost too fast sometimes. If you don't take the time to stretch the skin as much as possible, the wounded can end up with a sort of bridle of skin that will limit his or her range of motion."

El processed this information calmly. Actually, feeling so tranquil after the rush of recklessness that led her to Preston's rescue, and after going through that whole "almost dying" phase, was almost concerning her. She should feel something else, no? She was relieved, of course, but... yes, she was basically just relieved.

"Thanks, everyone. You saved my sorry ass, and I owe you, big time. And I'm sorry for all the mess I... dragged you through, Preston. You were right, I behaved like a hot-head, and put us both in danger."

"Heh, what's done is done. I shouldn't have gone on my own either, and all of that could have probably ended way better if we talked about the Abernathy's last week instead of both sulking like teenagers..."

"Touché, " admitted El with a half-smile. "Now let's talk seriously: I'm starving."

"Almost emptying our stock of medicine wasn't enough for you? You have to eat right now, without even thanking us better?"

Of course, Marcy had to complain about something, and El did feet guilty about the Stimpak stocks. Jun didn't have the proper equipment to cook some new ones right now, and they hadn't seen any on their scavenging trips. Nonetheless, the grumpy woman was the one who brought her a bowl of mashed corn and smoked hare stripes.

El just made a small trip to the toilets that day. She didn't dare to ask who took care of her about that for the last few days. Some things were better left unknown. She half slept, half talked to Mama Murphy and Codsworth for the rest of the day. Apparently, their house now had a turret on the roof, thanks to Sturges as always, and her old robotic butler was full of praise for the 'man's genius with a toolbox'. That explained the discreet motor sound El was hearing from her bed, and the old woman assured her that getting used to it wouldn't take long and wouldn't stop her from sleeping. And indeed, El slept like a rock that night.

It took her a few days to be able to work efficiently with the others again. Even if the Stimpaks were a miracle of science, they didn't help with the fatigue or her feeling of being out of touch with the world.

* * *

She told herself that she wouldn't reiterate the USAF mistake. She wasn't ready yet to head out there alone. She felt like she already had burned through her stock of beginner's luck, and tempting her fate one more time wasn't the smartest move she could take.

However, she didn't just sit around twiddling her thumbs. Preston first insisted that she came with him to see the Abernathys, to give them the locket back -he had grabbed it before exiting the station with her-. The way the family thanked them when they handed them their lost daughter's possession clenched El's heart, but in the right way. They insisted on giving them carrot shoots, assuring them that they would survive the winter if they were protected from the wind, and a hundred caps. El didn't see the pleased face Preston made when she tried, without much success, to refuse the farmer's reward -they didn't do it for the money, no, really, you don't have to, just... well, if you insist, thank you, so much, thanks-.

Before the two Sanctuary settlers left the farm, Connie Abernathy came to see them, and told them almost solemnly:

"Our family and our three farmers voted, unanimously. We would like to join the Minutemen. We can't do much in terms of fighting, but neither can we pretend that us trying to never get involved in anything is a good way to live a meaningful life. If you accept us in, we'll do our best, and spread the word too. Merchants regularly stop there, and the fact that the Minutemen returned shouldn't be kept a secret."

Preston beamed with genuine joy until everyone in Sanctuary went to sleep that night, and El had to admit that she was pleased too, although she hadn't done much on helping them out. That's how she got caught up in the Minutemen, without really realizing it.

Sturges and El worked together a whole week to scrap everything he could use from the Olivia station. As Preston had put it "Now that it's cleared, it'd be a shame to not use it, right?". El used the cot that Preston carried her on to bring her back to Sanctuary. Apart from the fact that it was more efficient to bring mack heavy loads to their settlement, El saw it as some kind of expiation -she was no lightweight, and Preston must have sweat out his life dragging her all this way-. Besides, she still had Buffout to help her.

Sanctuary welcomed two new settlers, and El met her first still-human-inside ghoul, Mary. She was a tiny, tenacious woman, with a laugh loud enough to wake up the deads. El was surprised that Mary didn't look like the feral ghouls she saw. Instead of being almost melted looking, her skin kind of resembled El's burn scar, with more pronounced ridges, but much more mobile than one could imagine. It wasn't either like some serious burn victims that El had seen in war documentaries, where they face almost looked like a mask. Instead, Mary was an open book when it came to showing her emotions with subtle twitches on her face -and Sturges became her favorite victim for uncalled winks and seductive grins-. The absence of a nose and the fact that her ears were barely an outline was unsettling at first, but she got used to it and stopped being uncomfortable after a while.

The Quincy survivor didn't say anything about the presence of a ghoul in their settlement which, Mary told El, was surprising. Apparently, racism wasn't a thing from the past as El could have thought, and Mary had been wandering around in the Commonwealth -selling her temporary services as an odd-job woman to some settlements, being a bit of a mailwoman, doing some caravan guarding when the trader couldn't find better- since all the ghouls had been expelled from Diamond City, five years ago. El was a bit put off to learn that the place where she was supposed to go to find her son's tracks was the new "no Asians allowed" neighborhood.

The other settler, a man named Chuck, was a fifty-something used-to-be-retired Minuteman. Apparently, the word had already spread from the Abernathys, and he just followed the beacon signal from there. The two newcomers integrated easily in their routine and started to accommodate El's old house. In the beginning, she had hesitated, but she realized that she would feel better if these old walls became a true home, instead of being a relic of the past. She just insisted on keeping Shaun's bedroom intact, and they understood.

Winter came upon them, and food became mostly smoked or fresh meat, depending on how lucky the hunters had been the last days, as they wanted to preserve as much as possible their stocks of Pre-War food in case of emergency. El was still wearing her Vault Suit and her burned-at-the-collar duster, but she had added an old pair of leather pants and a patched wool shirt, on top of having finally found a pair of hiking shoes. Her torso and legs were now protected by a leather armor, that she picked on the dead raiders' bodies at the USAF station. It did felt wrong to wear a dead man's clothes, moreover a man that she killed, but she rationalized it by thinking that every clothes that she could find out there had once belonged to someone now dead.

El also learned, during this period, how she was supposed to deal with her "women's issues". She was deadly embarrassed the day she came to see Mama Murphy and asked her if she knew where she could find protection.

"A grown-up woman like you, acting like an embarrassed teenager because of this?" the old woman had answered in a laugh. "You know how to sew, right? Then you sew your protection, and when they are dirty you wash them and boil them. It is not complicated."

El noticed how the mild to strong puritanism that was once prevalent in America was now considered ridiculous. If it didn't disturb anyone to hear when Marcy and June were... intimate in their bedroom, it shouldn't disturb anyone to know that she was on her period. Her relative modesty, that her mother used to consider barely sufficient, was now ridiculous prudishness.

During December, the radio station that Sturges had put up in El's old laundry room informed them that some settlers required the Minutemen's services.

Tenpines Bluff was a small settlement north of Bedford, on a small street surrounded by wood. The old street sign indicated Win-something-y Way, and a nearby clearing in the woods served as their garden.

El had thought that life at Sanctuary was spartan, but she changed her mind at Tenpines Bluff. The four settlers were borderline emaciated, their clothes nothing more than rags, and their houses in a similar state. Two apparently recent graves behind the bigger house completed the picture.

"It's been going on like this for almost half a year," had told them a jaded woman with hollow eyes, "since this gang of raider took quarters in the old aerodrome, one hour south of here. At first, they just came and asked for a few tatos, and we didn't blink an eye: we could spare those tatos, had plenty of them, and buying our safety didn't seem like a bad idea... But each time they came back, they wanted more. More food, more water... Last week, they ended up asking for a girl."

The woman shivered, and El took in a full blast the misery of these settlers.

"I tried to... I begged them to take me, but they wanted June..." her voice was broken now, and tears were running down her cheeks, but she kept on: "We couldn't stop them, not with the kind of weapons we have, and they outnumber us. That night we... we heard everything. They left in the morning, and we had to take care of June. Clay, her boyfriend, was devastated. June... June took her own life three days ago, and Clay lost his mind... He went to fight them that night, we didn't see him leave. In the morning, his body was... displayed in front of our house..." she waved at their front door, and El glanced with horror at the blood-smeared pole next to it. Clay's body had clearly been impaled on it. "They were only eighteen, so in love..."

The woman gave them the note found on Clay's corpse. The El's guts twisted at the sight of the bloodstains on the crumbled piece of paper. Despite being poorly written, the message was clear: the raiders would not tolerate anything more than pure submission from the settlement, and the settlers would pay the price of Clay's revolt.

El had always thought that humans were inherently good inside, and it was what drove her to become a lawyer. How naive had she been? Quelle idiote, vivant dans son petit monde de classe moyenne confortable... No one inherently good inside could do that to another human being. It was so _unfair_. These raiders didn't deserve justice anymore.

Preston didn't need to do any convincing on this one. The raiders had put up their base camp on the tarmac, surrounding it with old plane frames. It would have been a great emplacement to guard, with the flat ground around it making it easy to spot potential enemies. However, those raiders being true to their reputation of a poorly organized group, no guard was on duty when El and Preston approached carefully their camp at dusk, crouching in the dark. Well, actually there was one, but he was apparently stoned out of his mind, leaning against the entrance of their plane barricade, giggling mindlessly. El had the opportunity to christen her new hunting rifle. It was the same kind that her father taught her to use, and she hit her target perfectly. She felt the beginning of the combat rush and smiled proudly.

Preston and she shot the next five raiders like fish in a barrel when they exited their encampment. They were both hidden behind one of the concrete blocks used to demarcate the plane parking places, the entrance of the plane barricade right in front of them. The four remaining raiders had stayed hidden after seeing their companions being shot so easily, but it didn't save them.

This time, El indulged the thrill of the fight without acting _too_ recklessly. It was so easy to ignore this pinch of guilt and let herself be carried by the feeling of firepower. And the reaction of the settlers when they came back was so worth it... The two Minutemen -this time El didn't contradict Preston- brought the raiders' weapons and ammunition to Tenpines Bluff, and left them to the settlers. It would have been better for them to obtain guns less loaded with memories, but they couldn't spit on new means to protect themselves.

El was still not sleeping well but was incapable of remembering what her nightmares were made of. She jokingly had told Sturges that the bags under her eyes were the finishing touch of her "perfect wastelander" look.

"I must admit that you've changed quite a bit since you came to rescue us at Concord."

"Nice euphemism to imply that I looked better before, " she had teased him.

"Aww, did I upset you? If you want my opinion, you look better now. More... prone to kick the butt of anyone that'd get in your way."

El had blushed at the praise, which surprised her. In her old life, it wouldn't have been a compliment at all. But indeed, despite the lack of full-length mirror in Sanctuary, she had witnessed her slow transformation: her hair had been evened after the USAF incident, now chin-length and combed on the left side of her head, showing her burn scar -she had gotten used to it now-; her hands weren't soft as they used to be, now somewhat callous and always scratched; she had lost some of the fat that used to soften her curves and had put on a bit of muscle; her legs and everything else hadn't seen the blade of a razor in ages; her face was often smeared with dirt or grease at the end of the day. She didn't look like a housewife anymore.

When January came, the Minutemen had three healthy settlements under their flag. El was proud of what they did, but she was starting to champ at the bit. Tenpines Bluff and the Abernathy Farm now had turrets too, and the beginning of a fence was starting to raise around Sanctuary. In their settlements now lived thirty people, well enough fed and sharing their resources. The only problem was the lack of good weapons: some traders had passed in the settlements, but caps were too tight to afford more than ammo for their pipe pistols and revolvers. The scavenging missions in the suburbs of the area did sometimes bring good results, but not nearly enough.

Hence El was becoming restless.


	9. Dès que le vent soufflera

Hence El was becoming restless.

"I'm leaving Sanctuary next week," she said bluntly one night at dinner time.

A concert of questions answered her. All of them, except Mama Murphy, seemed surprised by her affirmation.

"I need... I need to find my son. I can't stay here indefinitely, I'm almost out of excuses for postponing."

Everyone around the patched up table went quiet. She could feel their solicitude, and once again she realized how lucky she had been to find them. Without everyone, she'd probably have ended up dead on the road, somewhere, robbed by raiders, or eaten by a Yao-Guai -those terrible mutated bear Preston told her about-, or, to be honest, there would have been a great risk of her choosing to end her own life... Instead she was there, surrounded by good-hearted people, in a room warmed by the fire in the corner and their body heat, all of them around a warm meal of freshly hunted meat and roasted wild onions with brain mushrooms -they were tricky to cook right, but as a very resilient fungus, they were a perfect winter source of food-. She was a putain de chanceuse...

Sturges patted her on the shoulder and tried to smile. She thanked him with a nod and cleared her throat.

"It's just that... I need your help with something because I don't see myself leaving without doing it. Plus, it'd be great for Sanctuary to access all these technologies."

Chuck and Mary knew for the Vault uphill, as El wasn't keeping her story a secret. She cleared her throat again, trying to stop a lump from forming in it:

"Would you... would you... help me bury them?"

El couldn't form a longer sentence, as it would probably make downright sob. She felt her eyes water and smiled weekly.

"Stupid onions making me cry," she said raising her head from her plate, catching the eyes of Mary who was sitting in front of her.

The ghoul reached for her hand and stroked it lightly. Her unusual skin texture was still odd to El, but it was a comforting gesture nonetheless. The coarse voice was also full of solicitude:

"Of course we're gonna help ya, I bet none of us even know why ya ask if we'd help. We all know what it's like to lose someone..."

Mary and El had talked a lot about Pre War times, sharing bittersweet memories, about take out meals, brand new clothes, radiation-free water, and perfectly manicured nails. The ghoul was married during these times, to a man named Rick, and after the bombs dropped, they both turned into ghouls. Sadly, Rick turned into a feral one, which completely erased his wife from his mind. She tried to stay with him, locking themselves into their old apartment, as he didn't attack her. But one night she had wakened up to see that he managed to escape by jumping through a window, and she never located him after that. She had two hundred years to mourn her spouse, but El still related to her.

Everyone around the table agreed with the ghoul, even Marcy, who nodded firmly. The atmosphere for the end of the dinner was pretty grave.

The burial took place two days after, from dusk to dawn. Thirty graves had been dug at the end of Sanctuary, on the small descent leading to the river surrounding the neighborhood. The repetitive task of sticking her shovel in the dirt and discarding it on the side had been comforting for El's numb mind. Moving all the bodies from the vault to their tumb proved more difficult, at least emotionally. They didn't have enough white cloth to make a proper shroud for everyone, so they just covered their faces with it.

To El's demand, they moved Nate's body last. Preston was the one who helped her carry the cot next to her husband's final resting place, and she internally thanked everyone for not insisting on carrying him at her place, despite her shaking legs and the tears running down her cheeks. At Sanctuary, El carefully covered Nate's body with the American flag he had brought from Anchorage so long ago, which she had found folded behind its broken protective glass in their entrance. She gently kissed his still cold forehead one last time. With the flag covering the wound in his chest, and despite his pale skin, he looked like he was just sleeping.

"Thanks for everything, mon coeur," she whispered in a pathetic breath. "I will find Shaun, and I'll make sure he grows strong and happy, and as wonderful as his father..."

She stood, still crying, and the other settlers took this as a signal to start lowering the bodies in their graves.

The freshly dug dirt monticules were litten by the last ray of sunshine. El didn't manage to give the eulogy, so the task went to Mama Murphy, who kept it sober and short. And, like that, the victims of Vault 111 rested in peace. The settlers left El to mourn next to Nate's grave. At some point, Mary brought her a warm thistle herbal tea. When the night went completely dark, Sturges came to walk her back to the house, as she was shivering in the cold wind.

* * *

"You're sure you have everything?" asked Sturges stressfully.

"Yes, for the fifth time! When you'll give me back my pistol, that is."

He smiled proudly at the mention, seemingly forgetting about his worries at the mention. He opened one of the many drawers next to his workshop, and grabbed the gun with a sparkle in his eye, showing it to his attentive spectator:

"Look at this beauty: a calibrated powerful receiver, a reflex sight, a comfort grip, a long ported barrel for that recoil you've been complaining about, a quick eject magazine and this sweet, sweet suppressor you brought back from that scavenging three weeks ago."

Even if El couldn't really understand all his jargon, she still realized it was a definite improvement on the previous version of this weapon. A pinch of guilt grabbed her stomach:

"But, all theses resources you used for me... Couldn't you have used them on modifications for Sanctuary defenses? Or Tenpine's Bluff's ones, I heard they..."

"Nonsense!" he interrupted her. "I'll have plenty of time and supplies -thanks to the Vault- to use when you'll be on the road. Right now, you're the one who needs them. I wouldn't have let you go out there with only your hunting rifle and that knife of yours, as sharp as it is."

El eyed her pack on the ground, the hunting rifle strapped to the side of the trekking bag. It had been a lucky acquisition, and it had been Preston, this time, who insisted on her keeping it. The rifle was sturdy and trustworthy, with beautifully weathered wood and an almost new-looking scope, alongside the kind of light long barrel she learned to hunt with during her teenage years. No doubt its last owner took good care of it. The only downside was that the .308 ammo it needed wasn't as common as the .38, or the 10mm for that matter. Trashcan Carla -the only trader who went North enough to trade with Sanctuary- had sold them all of her current stock of these three types of ammunition, meaning that the settlement was now as poor as it could be. The trader also informed El that if she wanted to go to Diamond City, she should try to stay away from College Square. It was held by raiders, on top of allegedly being over a metro station swarming with feral ghouls.

The walk to Diamond City, the new name of Fenway Park, was at least 8 hours long. Given that she never took this road by foot, and that it probably wouldn't be a walk in the park, it would take her at least two days: she wouldn't wander around at night time, which came pretty quickly in January. She was going to follow what used to be route 2, and probably stop for the night at its crossway with interstate 95. Not the most direct, but there was no way she'd get lost like that: the map on her PipBoy was good enough, but not very detailed either, and she didn't want to stare at it all day long.

The sun was now fully over the line of the horizon. She took a sharp breath, and slid her arms in the straps of her bag, adjusting it as well as she could. It was as light as it could be but pretty cumbersome, as she had her sleeping bag and a small pot for boiling water or bandages if needed. Medicine was scarce, but she had a few Stimpaks in an old lunchbox, with a few other drugs. Water was heavy too, but couldn't be look down upon.

"Thanks a lot, Sturges," she said while putting the pistol in her hip holster. "It is a wonderful gift, I'll put it to good use. And with this, I have all I need, promise!"

"And about the advice we gave you?"

She heard Mama Murphy sigh at Sturges' insistence on finding a proof that El was not ready. All the settlers were gathered between their two houses, ready to watch her leave. Their presence was reassuring, and almost made her forget, as always, that hollow feeling that was lingering inside of her.

"I don't go inside the water, because radiation and big mutated crabs..."

"Mirelurks!" interviened Sturges.

"Oui oui, mire-trucs!" She stuck out her tongue. "If I see big green stupid humanoids, I run as far as I can without being seen, and I make sure they don't have dogs. If the clouds turn green and I hear a weird thunder, I take a Rad-X pill and I find a tight shelter as quick as I can. If someone offers me candies and asks me to come in his trailer, I refuse and call 911."

"Yes, perfect!... Wait, what?"

"Forget it," said Mary with a smile, "you couldn't understand the reference."

Dogmeat, sitting at El's feet, whimpered almost impatiently. The dog was wearing the makeshift leather bag she had made him, so she wouldn't have to carry his food and water.

"I agree with Mr. Waggy Tail here. I'm going now. I'll try to come back as soon as I can... Take good care of yourselves."

She hugged her fellow settlers one by one. In front of Preston, she said hesitantly:

"I can't promise anything but... I'll try to help those who need it on the way, you know? Making the Minutemen establish themselves again as a community to be counted on."

"I'm sure you'll do fine. I'm sorry I can't come with you, but our three settlements here still need protection and the settlers need to be taught how to defend themselves."

"It's all right, I get it. Furthermore, Dogmeat is a much better conversationalist than you," she winked at the Minuteman, earning his smile and a friendly handshake.

In front of Sturges, she patted his shoulder, trying to seem confident and reassuring.

"Don't worry about me, I'm a grown-up now! When I come back, I better see this whole settlement guarded like Fort Knox, and its inhabitants provided for as good as if they were living at the Ritz."

"Let me guess, I couldn't understand the reference?"

"I'll teach you my ways when I return, grasshopper."

He rolled his eyes and leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead.

"Grasshopper yourself. Your wittiness won't make me forget that time you almost burned the house down with that blowtorch."

She couldn't find anything to retort, as she was feeling like her cheeks were on fire.

"Aww, Ellie is blushing 'cause a guy kissed her!" cheered Mary, adding to the young woman embarrassment.

"Hush! And don't call me Ellie."

She couldn't pretend to be mad, as a smile was emerging on her lips. Sliding her thumbs in the straps of her bag, she took a step back, and gave a last goodbye to her friends, before turning around, Dogmeat on her heels.

After crossing the bridge of Sanctuary, she stopped being able to see them.

"Stupid Americans," she muttered at the dog. "They go all shocked and flustered when you try to do la bise, so you refrain yourself for all these years, and then they kiss you on the head out of blue, and then you react like a timid child. Tsk."

The road up until Concord was routine for her now, as she had followed it numerous times on her scavenging trips. She just had to stop a few minutes to shoot two bloodbug hatchlings from afar with her hunting rifle. It was three wasted bullets, probably, but those insects were making her skin crawl, and the description Chuck had given her of how it was to be stabbed by their sting was enough to motivate her eagerness at killing them.

El and Dogmeat stopped for lunch at a dilapidated gas station, or garage of some sort, a couple miles after Concord. Even if the road didn't pass directly through the city, knowing that she was so close to buildings potentially full of enemies didn't reassure her. She much preferred the clear view of the road and sparse woods of the countryside gave her.

The inside of the gas station was the home of two radroaches, which she quickly shot. The station wasn't packed with things, but she found a packet of Fancy Lads Snack Cakes and an intact roll of duct tape. She pocketed both with a smile, remembering how stoked Sturges acted on their scavenging missions when he found some tape. She wouldn't have a use for it right now, but it was fairly light and she could sell it for a few caps if she stumbled on a trader.

She sat on one of the tipped-over gas pumps and took off her bag.

"Here you are, Dogmeat. Bouchées de viande mijotée dans leur accompagnement de légumes fondants," she said, craking open a can of dog food from his package.

The InstaMash potatoes were as bland but filling as always, and the Fancy Lads Cakes weren't as good as she remembered. Two centuries of approximate storage would do that. El let her eyes wander around, and she notices a sun-bleached road sign indicating "Starlight Drive-In". She hadn't realized that she was so close to it, as the landscape had changed so much with the time. Nate and she used to come here from time to time, to watch one of the classic movies the managers projected, and drink a barely cold beer. She sighed and finished her last cake. Past is past.

Lunchtime was over pretty quickly, and El rested for a small hour before heading back on the road. She reached the crossway way sooner than she expected. The freeway interchange was roughly a few hundred meters in front of her, and she noticed a structure on the bridge crossing Interstate 95. Narrowing her eyes, she tried to determine if it was inhabited or not.

The structure was composed of a couple grayish canopies around a metal shack.

"Prudence est mère de sureté, Dogmeat," she whispered to the dog, before jumping over the railway of the road to try to conceal herself a bit in the bushes edging the tar. As she got closer, she noticed that corpses were littering the ground around the shack. After a few seconds, she was sure that no movements animated the area and headed toward it. Maybe there were things inside she could use?

It was pretty clear what happened there. Two humans wearing tattered military uniforms and old shirts were laid next to each other on the road, displaying horrible wounds from the bites and scratching that the ten dead feral ghouls had inflicted on them. El tried to ignore the glimpse of what she could only guess to be some guts spilling over the belt of one of the bodies. The smell of the long-dead walking corpses was as nauseating as she remembered, and she contained a shiver at the thought of dying by what could be considered dismemberment by zombies. The blood was just beginning to dry, adding macabre reflections of sunlight at the scene.

She was about to go through the two dead human's possession when she heard a faint exclamation coming from the shack, making her jump:

"Who's there? Show yourself!"

It was a woman's voice, apparently trying to seem intimidating despite its weakness. El drew her pistol, and carefully approached the door of the shack, or rather the curtain hiding the inside of the makeshift home. Behind it, leaning against the wall, in front of El's gunsight, sat a young blonde woman in a poor state. Breathing heavily, she was pointing a bloody serrated combat knife in front of her, roughly in the direction of El. The sitting woman was displaying numerous lacerations, four parallel ones particularly serious at the base of the neck. Her combat armor chest piece hadn't helped her much.

"Well, scavenger... I guess it's your... your lucky day," said the woman in a barely audible voice. "You won't have much to do to eliminate me and steal our resources..."

Still wary, El took a slow step forward and lowered her 10mm, figuring that the woman wasn't a direct threat. Dogmeat, behind her, had his ears flat on his head but wasn't growling.

"I'm not gonna kill you if you don't try to kill me. Drop your knife."

"So... so you'll have an easier time robbing me," laughed the wounded bitterly.

El reached for her pocket, making the woman jolt, and took a Stimpak out. The surprised look on the woman's face was genuine, and she lowered her knife instinctively.

"Drop your knife."

The knife dropped.

The woman's name was October -weird, but El didn't point it out- and couldn't be older than twenty, now that El had gotten a clear look at her. October and her companions had been attacked by the ghouls earlier this morning -be wary of churches, kay? Swarming with ferals more often than not-, and their already low stocks of Stimpaks had been emptied during the fight. She had emptied her stock of ammo too. She sighed with relief when El injected her with the content of the needle.

"There are some bandages on the top shelf there," she indicated with a nod. "I couldn't reach them like that."

She was now lying down on one of the cots of the shack, with a bit of color back at her cheeks.

"There you are, a perfect little mummy," said El with a smile as she tied the last bandage around October's arm.

"A what?"

"Don't worry, I'm just blathering."

"Ah. Thanks for your help, anyway. I'm by no means high ranking or anything, but the Gunners owe you the life of one of their conscripts."

El's blood froze, and she backed out hastily, drawing her pistol again. Imbécile! There she was, risking her life with a member of what Preston described as the Minutemen's arch enemy.

"You're a Gunner? ... Don't move!" she barked as she saw the woman trying to sit up in the cot to escape her aim.

"What? What!?"

"I'm with the Minutemen! Why don't you have that skull of yours painted somewhere?"

How was she supposed to recognize them without that skull, or the regiments of soldiers, or the windmills Preston told her about?

"What are you talking about? Aren't the Minutemen over? I thought the Gunners managed to dismantle them..."

"No, you didn't, you sick fuck! I guess it's disappointing to know you didn't kill everyone, huh?"

"I never step a foot in Quincy! I don't think I even ever saw a Minuteman during my time as a Gunner, it's been only three months!"

Her pistol still aimed at her, El slowly walked back way towards the doorway. She didn't know why, but she couldn't shoot the helpless Gunner who was pathetically half sitting on that wonky cot.

"I'm going to let you live, but I better not see you leave that bed before I'm not in the area anymore."

"I couldn't go far anyway," the other woman scoffed.

El was outside again. She quickly robbed the two dead Gunners from their ammo and caps. One hundred of them! The pinch of guilt she felt was not from the fact she was taking these men's money. No, they were Gunners who agreed to be part of such an organization, their corpses didn't deserve respect. But it came from the fact that, for a brief instant, she wondered if the young woman in the metal shed also had fifty caps on her. What was she thinking? How could she consider something like that? Killing someone out of self-defense or for justice was something, but to steal their money was something else. She couldn't stoop so low.

El put almost four miles between her and the dilapidated Gunner's outpost, before accepting that she should stop for the night, as the sun was slowly setting. Dogmeat and she had reached the limit of Arlington and had plenty of suburban houses to choose from the suburbs surrounding the road she was on. She chose the closest she could find, with boarded up window and door. After a few moments of listening, the ear stuck to the door, El declared to Dogmeat that if she couldn't hear any threat, then there was no threat. The dog, with his wiggling tail and his curious ears, comforted her choice.

A few kicks in the rotten wood boarding the door managed to open it. The inside of the house was the usual abandoned house from PreWar times, that she had gotten used to. After closing the door back as well as she could, she headed to a bedroom upstairs. There, she dropped her package, blocked the door with a console, did a quick wash of herself with a humid cloth, then served diner to Dogmeat and her. The music from her PipBoy, set low enough to not be heard outside of the room, was pleasant enough. That Diamond City radio was pretty good, despite Travis, the host, being possibly the least assured presentation on Earth.

"Well, I bet he doesn't have much concurrence anyway, right Dogmeat?"

It was barely 7PM, but the sky was already dark, so she couldn't move along anyway. As the mattress seemed pest-free enough, she unrolled her sleeping bag on it and made Dogmeat sit next to her to share his heat. She wasn't going to make a fire if she could abstain from it, as she didn't want to catch the attention of any ill-intentioned creature, or human.

The sleep was long to come.


	10. Quand on arrive en ville

Sleep was long to come.

El hadn't slept well by the time the dim morning sun started to lighten the bedroom through the boards occluding the window. She ate a couple mutfruit as breakfast. It was a good thing that they were so easy to preserve, like the apple they probably came from at some point. The small bottle of water that she downed made her regret once more that coffee, or even proper tea, was apparently so rare it was virtually impossible to procure some -the only things she found during scavenging were all unsafe to drink because compromised by moisture, as the seals had been removed by the previous owner-. Dogmeat ate another can of dog food. Next time, she'd have to give him Cram if she couldn't find more dog food on the way, or kill a rabbit.  
Both of them were soon ready to go, and El pushed the console out of the doorway to exit the room. She made sure to rummage through all the residence, in case she'd find something useful: it got her some clean socks, a sport's bra in her size -Génial! Hers was starting to be threadbare- and some antibiotic pills. It also got her a pretty big splinter in the hand, as the slat she'd tried to used to force open a locked suitcase had broken in her fist.

"My next acquisition is a crowbar. Or a lockpicking course..." she grunted while extracting the wood from her palm.

Roughly eight miles separated her from Fenway Park -well, Diamond City-. However, as she was about to actually enter the town and be much more cautious in her travel, it would probably take a bit more time than if she was able to walk without anything else in mind. And, as she was definitely avoiding the ghouls from the Cambridge metro station, she was gonna stick to the main road -southeast, then south- to cross Charles River as soon as possible. Then, she'll just have to follow it in direction of the west to find Fenway Park -zut à la fin, Diamond City-.  
The air outside was crisp, a nice change to the dusty and musty smell of the house she just came out of. El was feeling sore from the day before and the not so restful night. The morning was quiet, only the wind blowing through the leaves was disturbing the silence, with a few far away crows' calls. El's steps and the clicking of Dogmeat's claws on the asphalt seemed loud to her ears, and made her uneasy, as they were passing next to rows after rows of abandoned suburban houses, slaloming between empty car shells.

The road was about to head south, when she heard a low growl on her right, from the parking lot of what used to be a cheap hotel. She just had the time to hope it was her imagination, before seeing a humanoid form crawling from under a huge blue car roughly ten yards from her. Ghoul. She only had fought once against ghouls and she had been with Preston, who had ended up shooting most of them. A twist in her guts told her than now, alone, fear was much harder to contain.  
El clumsily shot the ghoul three times: the two shots in the chest didn't seem to inconvenience the creature, but the one in the head made it drop on the ground. Phew. She was lucky it was crawling not so fast on the tar, it was an easy target. Another growl made her turn her head. Apparently, despite the quietness of her gun, the creature's noises awoke its buddies.  
The woman promptly climbed on the roof of a car next to her on the road -a Corvega, once worth the annual income of a factory worker, now nothing more than a pile of rusty metal abandoned on the road-, to get a clear point of view. She spotted three other ghouls coming from further cars on the parking lot.

"Stay there, buddy," she mumbled to Dogmeat, who was still on the ground. She didn't want to let him go fight without her, his whimpers when he was hit were too heartbreaking.

The ghouls lurched during a few steps, before suddenly rushing on El's car. She managed to shoot two of them but the last one was on her, and a swift motion of its skinny and decayed arms made her fall on her behind. The fingernails of the creature, despite being longer and sharper than human nails, only got through her leather pants, leaving her jumpsuit underneath intact. With a ferocious bark, Dogmeat jumped at the throat of the ghoul, which was too focused on El to see the threat. With its trachea now resting a few feets away from its body, the creature wasn't much of a menace anymore.

"You're such a good boy," congratulated El, jumping from her perch in a swift movement. She patted the dog on the head, trying to ignore the blood and bits of rotten skin on his muzzle and the shaking of her hand.

Her heartbeat was slowly calming, as well as her breathing. She didn't let her guard down right away, trying to listen for another wet growl from a leftover ghoul. Reassured, she took a few minutes to chug a bit of water and offer some to her dog, and to rearrange her 10mm magazines in her pockets. She was proud of her progress in reloading efficiency: it wasn't perfect, but at least she had stopped dropping the magazines on the ground or blocking it in some way or another.

El and Dogmeat reached the Charles River without any other trouble, despite the young woman getting jumpier and jumpier as they progressed through tighter neighborhoods. The duo crossed the water on a concrete bridge, through which El could see the water where it had crumbled.

"Très rassurant... It's a good thing I've been following that wasteland's diet. I heard it is now a roaring success in Hollywood..." El grumbled, walking as far as she could from the holes.

As she remembered the advice of her friends at Sanctuary, she was trying to stay as far as she could from the water despite the fact her path was following the river. Now, the wind was howling through what was left of the Cambridge university athletic complex -the actual university was in Cambridge, on the other side of the river-, making the old metal beams and roofs creak gloomily. El had taken a few strips of smoked molerat meat out of her package and was eating while walking, as she didn't picture herself stopping in one of the unknown building to have a picnic.

El and Dogmeat arrived without issues in the Fens: they just had to circumvent a couple mirelurks that she spotted in the distance. The individual houses had replaced the sports complex and were now replaced by blocks of apartment buildings. She was starting to feel a bit more comfortable, as this trip to the city was going way better than what she expected.  
As to contradict her, a foul odor reached her nostrils, a mix between spoiled meat and fresh blood. She froze, and she pressed herself against the wall she was already walking next to, to hide in its shadow. It was only a stench, but she knew something was wrong. She slowly reached the end of the block, Dogmeat instinctively following her as quietly as he could. El peaked in the street on her right, from which the smell seemed to come from.

"Puny little humans, killed my dog!"

The voice of the green monster was cavernous and barely articulated. Super mutants were worse than El had imagined: at least seven feet tall, with a face human enough to show anger, the monster was bedecked with huge muscles under its green and hairless skin, and it was wearing nothing but a loincloth and a huge bundle dripping with blood on its back. It was where the smell was coming from. The corpse of a dead human, probably a raider given the outfit, was at the feet of the super mutant, next to the body of a green naked hound twice the size of Dogmeat.  
El almost gasped when she saw the monster casually take the arm of the raider, hold the body under its foot, and rip the limb from the torso. It then opened its meat bag and put the arm in there after removing the clothes left on it. Oh my god... A bloody wooden board pierced with nails was hanging from the mutant's belt, as its only piece of weaponry.

She didn't want to take a chance and started to back away slowly, in the hope of avoiding the threat by going deeper into the city, leaving the side of the river.

"Someone's there?", she heard the beast shout. She felt the now usual fear rise in her guts and started walking backward at a quicker pace, incapable of removing her eyes from the corner of the street.

The sound of a few heavy steps seemed to resonate in her ears, and then she saw the super mutant appear at the corner, a mere twenty meters in front of her. It saw her.

"Dogmeat, run!" she screamed desperately.

She turned her back on the monster and rushed away from him, not even able to check if her dog had listened to her.

"Can't escape me, human!"

Her legs were beating on the ground seemingly so fast she couldn't even think about it. Her bag, strapped tightly to her back, was slowing her down a bit, but her panicked mind didn't even think of removing it. The sound of Dogmeat claws on the ground next to her was covered by the menacing stomping she was hearing behind. She took a sharp turn left, as the clutter of the city seemed now way more welcoming than the open space of the main road.

"I'll wear your guts around my neck!"

She didn't know where she was going and lost count of how many times she turned, only thinking about running as fast as she could. But she was slowing down, undeniably, and she was still hearing the stomps in her back.

"Stop moving, stupid woman!"

Then she saw it at the end of the street. Fenway Park. Drawing in her last resources, she tried to run faster. Her lungs were burning, she was sweating under the coats of her winter apparel, and she could feel the taste of blood in her throat. She heard a human voice in front of her:

"Super mutant! Super mutant!"

It came from a man dressed in old baseball gear next to a defense turret, perched on a scaffolding structure across the street that delimitated the entrance of the plaza in front of Fenway Park. El didn't even think about telling him she was not a threat. Five other baseball players came from behind the makeshift fence, aiming their pipe rifle at the super mutant behind her.

Her legs took her no further than the entrance of the fence, after which she fell on her knees, so weak that the effort she made to roll and her back and point her weapon in the general direction of the mutant almost made her throw up. Thankfully, the men and the turret took care of it: she couldn't even see straight, or even aim properly.

"Street's cleared!" claimed the man that alerted the others.

"Well, aren't you a fast runner?" asked a feminine voice behind her.

El jumped a little and turned her head to see who was talking to her. It was a petite woman with shoulder-length brown hair, wearing a nice red leather coat -although worn out at the bottom- and a flat cap, in which was tucked a piece of paper reading "press". Her green eyes were twinkling with mischief, but her smile was genuinely compassionate. She held out a hand to El and helped her up when she took it. El's legs were still shaking, and her voice was hoarse when she spoke:

"Thank you..."

"No big deal, I'm not the one who shot this big bad guy, it's the guards. At least they do this part of their job okay."

"Are you okay, scavenger?" asked one of the men who helped taking down the mutant. Was it the one who saw her first? It was difficult to say, as the helmet was hiding his face.

"Yes... thanks to you all. I'm... I'm sorry that I brought that thing here," she was still trying to catch her breath. "But I am not a scavenger."

"Well, what are you then?" the man asked suspiciously.

"Just... just a traveler. I heard about Diamond City, and thought I may find what I need here."

"If you can't find it in Diamond City, you can't find it anywhere!" the guard seemed to relax a bit. "If it's your first time here, you should try the noodles from Takahashi. A real treat!"

"Hey James, how are you?" asked the woman in the leather coat on a teasing tone. The man sighed as if he had wished she'd have ignored him.

"I'm fine Piper, and that's all you're gonna get from me. You're not exactly in the mayor's good book, y' know?" he turned to El again and wished her a good day.

She thanked him once more for his help, and he proceeded to go back to his watch, as his companions did.

"So, Piper, right?" asked El.

"Indeed, I'm Piper Wright. Like, it's my last name. And you are?"

"Éléanore Jacquet-Jonhson, but call me El, it's easier... And this is Dogmeat," El replied, patting the dog on the head.

"Hmmm, so you're not from there, huh? That'd explain that little accent you have..." mumbled Piper, apparently more for herself than for her interlocutor. "Then let me say El, next time you encounter a super mutant, try something... explosive. It's a pretty good technic for these brutes."

At these words, El reached her left ear with her fingers. She wasn't going to use any explosives anytime soon, even if it was probably efficient to get rid of super mutants. Piper obviously noticed her motion but didn't ask anything about it.

"So, anyway, you want in Diamond City?" she inquired, pointing the closed gate behind her with her thumb.

"Well, yes, I do."

"Then do you mind helping me there? As you heard, the fat cats in the city don't really appreciate me. I've revealed too many of their dirty little secrets. Journalists' problems, you see?"

"Uhuh, " replied El vaguely. Piper eyed around to check if no guard was listening, and leaned towards El to whisper.

"You just have to get to this interphone there and say you need to enter 'cause you have things to sell at the market. They won't open otherwise, they know I'm hanging around. I've already been flunked..."

"Uuuuh, wait a minute, I don't have anything to sell... I don't think that having a spare roll of duct tape qualifies me as a trader."

"Relax, it doesn't have to be _true_ to work. They're not gonna follow you to the market to check if you sell stuff..."

El hesitated for a moment, before heading to the gate. Despite her obvious roguery, Piper seemed like a good person, and El needed to access the city anyway. She wasn't going to climb the outer wall to get in there. It would be too bad to have just escaped a super mutant only to break her neck on the sidewalk.

Surprisingly, the guards didn't even seem suspicious, and the huge green gate closing the entrance of the baseball stadium started to rumble, before slowly raising in a cacophony of metal scratching against metal. The fact that it was even still functioning was impressive. Behind it were the turnstiles that used to regulate the flow of eager Red Socks supporters, and behind them the old counters where they were able to get a hot dog or a beer to take to their seats. Now, these counters apparently served as the security break room and for storage of some sorts.  
The stairs to access the field were right in front of El. A pot-bellied man wearing an old tan suit was there, chatting with one of the guards. As soon as he spotted the two women who just entered the stadium, he frowned and came in their direction with resolution. Uhoh. Maybe El got involved in something, after all.

"Piper! Who you let you back inside? I told Sullivan to keep that gate shut!" he seemed definitely pissed, his hands moving in front of him dramatically. "You devious, rabble-rousing slanderer! The.. the level of dishonesty in that paper of yours! I'll have that printer scrapped for parts. "

"Oooh, that a statement, Mr. McDonough? 'Tyrant mayor shuts down the press?'" accused Piper, motioning the last sentence as if it was a headline. "Why don't we ask the newcomer? You support the news? 'Cause the mayor's threatening to throw free speech in the dumpster."

El, who was trying her best to not be noticed, suddenly felt the eyes of everyone in the entrance on her. So much for being discreet.

"Well, I don't know all the ins and outs, but freedom of the press is something important to build a city as great as Diamond City seems to be." Here, try to not get more involved than you are already, right?

"Oh, I didn't mean to bring you into this argument, ma'am. No no no... You look like Diamond City material, " tried to appologize the mayor, not stopping his extravagant hand movements. "Welcome to the great green jewel of the Commonwealth. Safe. Happy. A fine place to come, spend your money, settle down... Don't let this muckraker here tell you otherwise, all right? "

Something sounded false in the way the mayor was speaking. Maybe he was reminding El too much of some of the politicians from her time, all words and no action. She grunted in a way that could mean yes or no.

"Well, I must excuse myself, but a mayor's duties never stop! Have a great stay ma'am, and do not hesitate to ask a guard if you have questions about this great city of ours!"

He turned away and walked up the stairs, and there was no way he didn't hear Piper say that the guards weren't allowed to do much else than tour guides anyway.

"Hmm, a big Diamond City welcome from the mayor. You feel honored yet? Look, I gotta go get settled in, but, um, stop by my office later. I have an idea for an article you'd be perfect for: don't think I didn't notice that PipBoy and that vault jumpsuit collar poking out of your shirt. It's not every day that a vault dweller comes by. In exchange, I could help you discover the city a bit? The guards won't tell you everything..."

Before El could say anything, the journalist was gone, trotting up the stairs. El hoped that there was somewhere she could rest in the stadium, a hotel of some sort or something. She wouldn't say no to a place to drop her bag and wash herself a bit.

She climbed the stairs and entered the Diamond City.


	11. La digue

She climbed the stairs and entered the Diamond City.

El didn't know what she expected, but she didn't expect that. Fenway Park wasn't Fenway Park anymore. If the stairs where she stood, leading down to the field, were untouched, everything else was packed to the brim with makeshifts houses, shacks, stairs and walkways. She spotted many different caravans and buses, piled and linked together with wood and metal walls. Other houses weren't using caravans and were just patchworks of cinder blocks, concrete walls, wooden bulkheads, and sheet steel roofs.

The lower stands were the messier, as every spot that wasn't a walkway was built on, creating tights alleys overs wich the roofs were almost touching each other. Electricity wasn't apparently a scarce resource, as the "streets" were lit by mismatched light bulbs, light strings, lamp posts, and neons. Down on the field, what used to be the infield was surrounded by what seemed to be a market of some sort, with various stalls and shops covered by colorful awnings or the overhangs of the upper floors of the boutiques. In the middle stood what looked liked a gigantic chimney on the top of a bar of some sort -counters were circling the thing, protected from the elements by a bright red canopy-.  
In the distance, on what used to be the bleachers, El noticed that trees and crops seemed to grow. Over her head, in her back, the upper stands were also inhabited although less crammed, with diverse makeshift hanging walkways leading to each house.  
The sounds of a living city were almost as she remembered, minus the humming of cars: people were chatting, talking, shouting; she even heard the giggles of children somewhere. It seemed so loud compared to the wasteland, or even the calm and lonely northeastern settlements she came from: El felt a burst of joy from seeing that civilization was still surviving. So much would have to be done at Sanctuary Hills, but if they had managed to do it in Diamond City, it could be done elsewhere.  
The smells were also an experience by themselves, as the walls surrounding the city were protecting it from most of the wind. And the people... So many people! After walking through the wastes, and barely meeting enough persons -including raiders- to fill her old neighborhood, seeing all these inhabitants was exhilarating.

El had the biggest smile across her face when she walked down the stairs. At the entrance of the market, on her left, a young girl was standing on a box and waving a journal in the air, shouting the headlines like an old school newsgirl.

"The synthetic Truth! Read the latest paper! Learn about the Institute schemes!"

El was passing in front of her when she called her out:

"Hey, you! You're a newcomer, right?" she didn't wait for her answer. "Here, the first paper is for free! Have a good day, and keep away from the Institute!"

"The Institute?" El inquired. She had heard of them at Sanctuary, but it sounded more like a legend, or a spooky story, than something real.

"You ain't heard of the Institute, lady? They snatch people up in the night and no one hears from them again."

"And no one can stop them?"

"Nooo that's what's wrong! No one ever saw the Institute or a kidnapping, and the security don't give a crap about it! You'll learn everything in our paper," she insisted, slapping the journal in her hand with a proud smile.

"So you work with Piper Wright?"

"Yeah I'm her sister, we work together at the Publick!" she pointed the rickety building behind her, which was indeed topped with a bright neon sign reading 'Publick Occurrences. Her mannerisms were bearing striking resemblances to Piper's. "I'm Nat Wright."

"So we'll see each other back soon, Nat Wright, your sister asked me to come by later."

"'Kay, lady! Have a good day, and don't trust the Institute!"

Nat resumed to her haranguing, and El kept on walking to visit the market.

The place was busy, but not enough to be hard to navigate in. El counted eight proper shops, along a few people selling not much more than the content of their backpack. She had to refrain from buying things, as didn't truly need anything more than a place to drop at the moment. The bar, or rather the restaurant, surprisingly held by a protectron, almost made her give in, as the smell of fresh hot food was making her salivate. It was apparently the noodle place the guard told her about.

After asking a guard for direction, she found the Dugout Inn: it was some kind of hotel housed in the remains of the changing rooms on the right side of the field, now behind the market. A few tables were installed in front of the entrance, with some customers having a snack or drinking a beer. Two of them were playing chess, laughing at their clever moves, and taunting each other. As it was still the afternoon, the inside of the Inn wasn't too busy, and only a few quiet chatters were covering the sound of the radio. A mismatched sitting area with old couches, armchairs, and a few tables was occupying the right part of the main room. Vadim, the man behind the counter, after trying to sell her his homemade alcohol with his strong Russian accent and warm exaggerated smile, told her to talk to his brother, Yefim, to rent a room.  
The two of them couldn't pass as something else than brothers, despite their apparently different characters. The room for the night cost her ten caps, plus ten for a not irradiated bucket of warm water in the morning -Yefim advised her to not drink it either, as the lack of radiation didn't mean a lack of bacteria-. It wasn't an unreasonable price, even if El still had a hard time estimating the cost of things in caps, but it made her realize that she would soon need more money.

The room that she rented was nice enough, with rather clean sheets on the bed, an almost threadbare grey couch, a coffee table, a dresser missing a drawer, and a desk. She dropped her package with relief on the ground and took Dogmeat's bag off his back. He shook in relief and yawned deeply before laying on the carpet, putting his muzzle on his paws.

"You're too cute when you do that, " said El, sitting beside him and stroking his fur.

She refrained from laying on her bed to rest, as she was sure she would fall asleep immediately. It was just the middle of the afternoon, and she wanted to visit the city and find someone who could help her start with her investigation for Shaun. She doubted the security could do much about it: after all, she wasn't a citizen of Diamond City, and they probably had already enough on their plate protecting the stadium and looking for these people allegedly kidnapped by the Institute.  
The fact that kidnapping was apparently commonplace in the Commonwealth was uncanny, but it was probably a coincidence, right? After all, according to the little girl from the Publick Occurences, no one ever saw one of the Institute kidnappings. For all she knew, the Institute could just be an elaborate Boogeyman: scary, yes, but still a myth.

Her eyelids were becoming heavy, and she forced herself to stand, as she could very well imagine sleeping on the carpet, her head on Dogmeat's belly. She made sure the lock on the door was sturdy enough to be trusted and hid her belonging under her bed before leaving. She had a small pouch containing her caps and expensive belongings -except her rifle, that was too cumbersome to carry without her bag-, and her holster was still carrying her gun and hunting knife. She'd never been a gun defender back in the days, as she grew up in a country were firearms weren't casually carried by other people than the police and military, but now she wouldn't feel comfortable wandering around without something to protect herself.

After closing the door behind her, she unfolded the journal Nat had given her. The first three pages were personal ads, obituary -lovely-, ads from the shops she saw in the market or traveling merchants, marriage and birth announcement, all bits and pieces from the life in Diamond City. The main piece, however, was the article Nat was talking about, 'The synthetic truth'.

_January, 2288__  
__The Synthetic Truth__  
__By__  
__Piper Wright_

_Noodles. We all eat them. We all love them. And Diamond City's Power Noodles has supplied this sustenance for the past fifteen years. From the stilted mechanical cadence of Takahashi's programmed Japanese, to the fragrant steam that wafts from each bowl, to the scalding tang of each delicious mouthful - the ordering and eating of noodles is but one of many shared human experiences. Or is it?  
__I was struck by this very question as I sat at the counter of Power Noodles last Wednesday night, just after 5:00 pm, enjoying a dinner I had so many times before. That's when I noticed our very own Mayor McDonough sidle up to a stool, and engage in the very same ritual. Right hand extending. Mouth opening. Teeth chewing. Yes, eating noodles. The shared experience of almost every Diamond City resident.  
__So it must have also seemed to the residents of Diamond City nearly sixty years ago, on an uncharacteristically warm May evening in 2229, as they sat around this very same counter. But that was before the days of Takahashi and his noodles, when the bar served not noodles, but ice cold Nuka-Colas, frothy beers and stiff shots of whiskey. The barman's name was Henry, and that night, he facilitated the shared human experiences of drinking, smoking, talking and laughing. That is, until tragedy struck.  
__There aren't many among us who are even old enough to remember that evening - although some of the city's Ghoul residents certainly could have, had they not been forcibly removed, thanks to Mayor McDonough's anti-Ghoul decree of 2282. But there is one person among us who does remember, distinctly, the events of that evening: respected matriarch Eustace Hawthorne, who recounted her story in a Publick Occurrences exclusive interview._

_"Oh, I was there all right. Sitting right at the bar, sure as you're sitting in front of me now. Twenty-two years old or so, and just looking to have a good time. I was safe behind the Wall - we all were - so what was the harm? And let me tell you, that Mr. Carter made it easy. He came into town earlier that day, said he was from out west somewhere. It didn't really matter. What did matter was his smile, and his laugh, and the way he'd make everyone feel at ease. That night, at the bar, we all just sort of crowded around him. Everyone wanted to exchange a word, or hear about the state of the Commonwealth. And Mr. Carter, he was all too happy to oblige. It was just so wonderful. Until it wasn't."_

_Eustace continued her account of that evening, and the moment when things turned sinister, and the truth about Mr. Carter was revealed._

_"We'd been drinking, and carrying on, must have been three hours. Mr. Carter had four or five drinks in that time. He seemed a bit drunk, I guess, like the rest of us. Then something just sort of happened. He was smiling, but the smile sort of went from his face, all in an instant. And then his cheek started twitching, kind of funny. And I remember watching him, clear as if it happened just yesterday. He reached inside his coat, took out a revolver, and then 'Blam!'- He shot Henry, the barman, right in the head. Didn't hesitate, didn't show any emotion- Mr. Carter killed Henry as casually as if he were paying him for a drink. But his cheek never did stop twitching. Let me tell you, all Hell broke loose after that."_

_What Eustace is describing is, of course, is the infamous event known as the "Broken Mask," when the people of the Commonwealth learned for the first time that the Institute, the shadowy scientific organization responsible for the creation of combat androids, had actually succeeded in creating a model so advanced, it could effortlessly infiltrate human society. Unbeknownst to the people of Diamond City, the Institute had somehow evolved their androids into true synthetic humans. Synths._

_"After he shot Henry, that Mr. Carter shot three or four other people, too. Like I said, all Hell broke loose. The guards came running, they opened fire, and Mr. Carter he kept shooting, and throwing people around left and right. Finally, those guards put him down. Seemed like they had killed a man who had flipped his lid. Gone crazy. And he lay there like a dead crazy man, sure enough. God, it was horrible. But then we saw the plastic, and the metal- this was one of them early synths, you see - and we realized it wasn't a man at all. It was then we all knew. The Institute wasn't just 'out there'. The Institute was everywhere now. Among us."_

_It was never determined precisely why the synth known as Mr. Carter went on his killing spree. Some suggested he had somehow been remotely controlled by the Institute, who wanted to test his combat effectiveness. Still, others felt he had simply malfunctioned (a hypothesis supported by the twitching cheek), and was never meant to kill anyone. But at that time, the "why" hardly seemed important. What mattered was that the humans of the Commonwealth had been truly infiltrated by an organization whose intentions were, and still are, a complete mystery - using a model of synth even less advanced than the ones the Institute has in service today.  
__Which brings us to noodles. Specifically, the noodles consumed by Mayor McDonough last Wednesday night, in the same spot that Mr. Carter the synth went haywire, and mercilessly killed several people - after spending hours sharing an experience the people of Diamond City assumed was reserved for members of the human race. They were wrong._

_Are we?_

The article was well written, and the message was clear. El still scratched her head at the journalist's extrapolation: she probably had a gut feeling about the mayor, probably stronger than El's, but it still seemed too far stretched to accuse him of being a synth. Chuck had told her about them, and it seemed still so weird to her. Artificial humans, only distinguishable from natural ones if you cracked their head open to see if plastic was in there as described by the article? And, to top all that, weapons from the Institute? It seemed so futuristic...

"Futuristic... ma fille, you should reconsider your views of what the future is promising," she scoffed for herself.

She was at the entrance of the market, about to head to Publick Occurences, in the hope that Piper's suggestion of taking her through the city if they talked before was still standing, when she heard an altercation near the noodle restaurant. A small crowd had gathered around to men facing each other, one of them pointing his pistol at the head of the other.

"Get away from me, you bastard!"

"Kyle, please, listened to me!" implored the man who was threatened, his hand desperately up in the air. "I'm your brother, for God's sake! I am no synth!"

"That's exactly what a synth would say!" spat Kyle violently. El could have sworn there was also fear transpiring in his voice. "You killed Riley and replaced him, don't trick me!"

"Citizen, I'm gonna ask you to lower your weapon," intervened a guard that had cut through the crowd to investigate the problem.

"No! Never! Don't you see that he fooled you! He's with the Institute!"

With a demented look on his face, Kyle raised his weapon to aim at his brother's head. The sudden gunfire made El jump. Kyle body's hit the ground with a soft sound and the guard, the muzzle of his rifle now smoking slightly in the descending light of the sun, shouted at the crowd:

"Show's over! The Institute has not and can not infiltrate Diamond City! Accusing a fellow citizen of being a synth is unacceptable, and menacing his life turns you into an enemy of this city! Now, resume your activities!"

It all occurred so quickly that El stood there, baffled by what just happened. This man had tried to kill his brother just because he thought he was a synth? What made him think that? And the guard just shot him right in the head, probably to defend Riley... but the stern, borderline accusatory speech that followed his shooting didn't sit quite right with El. She was stopped in her thoughts by the guard calling her:

"Hey, drifter! Move along, there's nothing to see here!"

Not willing to take her chance objecting after seeing him react so quickly in front of Kyle, she nodded and turned away from the scene, where two other guards had come to evacuate the corpse. Nat wasn't in front of the Publick Occurrences anymore, so El just knocked on the door, hoping someone would answer.

"Hey, Blue, you are here! I thought I'd have to hunt you down in the city, you didn't seem too eager about our paper in front of McDonough..."

"Blue?"

"Yeah, you're a vault dweller. So, you know, the color of your jumpsuit and everything... Anyway, you're willing to have an interview with me, for my next article? I think it's time Diamond City had a little outside perspective on the life there... "

"Well, yes, if you let me read it before printing... I don't really want you to extrapolate based upon what I'm gonna say."

"Already suspicious, heh? But that's not an unreasonable demand, so okay. Come sit there, we'll get started..."

The two women sat in front of each other on assorted red sofas, separated by a coffee table.

"So, as I knew you're from a Vault... How would you describe your time on the inside?" asked Piper, pencil ready over her clipboard.

"My family and I were frozen as soon as we entered the vault, with everyone else... We didn't actually _live_ there... We just... slept, I guess."

"Wait. They boxed you up in a fridge? The whole time? Are you saying you were alive before the War?" she was so surprised her pen didn't even touch her draft.

"Yes. I was born in 2052. Even if I didn't really age in the vault, I guess that I can say I'm about to be 236 years old," replied El with a sad smile.

"And where is your family now?"

"They..." El cleared her throat. "They died in the vault, I saw it happened from my pod. At some point during our sleep, a man and a woman came and opened my husband's cryo pod, and... and he tried to resist, but they shot him and took our baby..." merde, her voice had broke at the end of the sentence.

"Oh my... I'm sorry to hear that... I can't imagine living that and then waking up in this world..." true concern was filling her voice, and El couldn't help but feel more comfortable with her already. So much for trying to not trust the journalist right away. "Is this why you came to Diamond City?"

"Yes, in the hope I could find pieces of information about Shaun, my son."

"This is such an inspiring story that you have, Blue... 'The woman out of time', looking for her kidnapped son, traveling through the Commonwealth... Sorry, I'm getting a bit carried away. So... You've seen the Commonwealth, before and after the War, and you've seen Diamond City. How does it compare to your old life?"

El had to admit that Piper was a good interviewer. They must have spent at least an hour talking in the journalist house office, Dogmeat casually laying on Piper's couch, his head on El's laps. At some point, without her notice, the interview had turned into chatting, Piper's clipboard resting unused on the coffee table. The journalist asked El at one point if she thought that the Institute was behind what happened to her family, but the sole survivor of vault 111 had no idea about who could have done that and wasn't familiar enough about the Commonwealth's dangers to speculate on the culprit.

True to her words, Piper made El walk around the stadium, showing her everything she needed to know about the city. The field was composed of three roughly size equivalent parts: the market and a few houses over its shops and behind it; the crops, livestock pen and the communal dorm of most of the farmers -based on Piper's explanations, poverty wasn't uncommon in Diamon City-; and the water reservoir of the town, supplied by a providential underground spring.  
The lower stands were occupied by the houses of what Piper called the 'regular people': members of the security, some shop workers and their employees, a few sedentary scavengers, varied artisans, and some low ranking administrative workers. What used to be the bleachers, at the end of the stadium, had been resourcefully turned into terrace cultivation.  
The upper stands, named exactly like that, were mostly inhabited by stuck up, close-minded, and obnoxious rich people, according to Piper. She didn't have many pleasant things to say about them, and from what she said El couldn't disagree with the vehement young woman. From her discussion with Mary, she knew the ghoul shared Piper's opinion: it was the upper stands that apparently came up with this "no ghoul policy" idea.

Despite the few flaws of Diamond City, El was still amazed by what humans had managed to build on the ruins of the old world. The simple fact that the city was wealthy enough to afford frivolous jobs, such as a hairdresser, a beautician, a couple artists... It was filling El with hope. Piper, despite how much she had to say about her town's deficiencies, was truly committed to its citizens and was obviously proud that the 'Great Green Jewel of the Commonwealth' would inspire such feeling in her interviewee turned tourist.

"Here, you see this silly pink neon sign?" asked Piper at the end of their tour, on the way back to the market. "It's Nick Valentine's detective agency. He's the one you'll need to come and see about your son's kidnapping," she said, taking a pocket watch out of her coat to have a look at the time. "I think it's closed now, he doesn't need much sleep, but he follows the schedule of his secretary."

Admittedly, the sun had been eclipsed by the stadium's walls for more than an hour and was probably even set. The various lights coming from the streets and the windows of the houses made it easy for the two women to find their way to the Dugout Inn. Piper had suggested that they'd have a drink there before calling it a day, and El had accepted, still impressed by how the journalist had made her change her mind about not being too trustful.

The drink turned into several ones. The Dugout was way busier now, and the presence of so many people to talk to in the same place was already disinhibiting El a bit. Piper knew everyone, and everyone knew her. If the security and the mayor were unanimously wary of her, most of the people the two women talked to this evening seemed to like the journalist.  
El bought a tall glass of Vadim's alcohol -the Bobrov's Best Moonshine- and caused the barman and the close customers to burst in laughter when she almost choked herself with what was nothing more, according to her, than rubbing alcohol with a vague aroma of melon. She chatted with several inhabitants, sharing the story of her fight with the Deathclaw to a cheering audience. Dogmeat also put on his show and did tricks in front of the customers who bribed him with a piece of food from their plate.

The alcohol clouding her brain, backed by the fact that she hadn't eaten since noon, made her forget the life outside the bar. She had no concern about the day after, and if that Valentine could help her, and if she would find Shaun, and if he wasn't already dead, and if _she_ wasn't going to die...  
As the night progressed, the customers became more and more inebriated. El ended up, without knowing how, singing an old french bawdy song with everyone, the fifteen last customers simply repeating the lyrics after her, butchering the words but laughing nonetheless.

However, El still hadn't indulged in the sleep she needed and it was, fortunately, the exhaustion that brought her to her bed, instead of pure inebriation.

She fell asleep as soon as she hit the mattress.


	12. La ville que j'aimais tant

A young man with the face of a cherub framed by chestnut curls waved at her from the other side of the bar, and called her:

"El! I'm so glad to see you! It's been a while! How are you?" he asked with a smile that made his eyes twinkle.

"Huh, I'm fine, but who are you?"

"Oh, come on! You don't remember me? We met in Concord!"

Slowly, he drew his pipe pistol out of his belt and aimed at her face. She felt the fear knot her guts, but she couldn't move. The man fired, but instead of killing her, it's his torso that got pierced with half a dozen bullets. Blood oozing from his wound, the smile of the man was still on his face, and when he talked again the crimson liquid dripped from his lips:

"I heard that you met some of my friends too! They'll be delighted that you came to say hello..."

El noticed at this moment that the bar was busy with a dozen of smiling people chatting together. They turned to look at her in a synchronized movement. One of them had his guts almost hanging out of his abdomen, horribly wounded by shot wounds, too many to count them. A lady, laying on the floor, had her torso smashed on the concrete, showing her still-beating heart, while she was casually chatting with a man bearing a laser burn on his torso and a bullet holes through his right eye. A woman in combat armor, a pouch of tinkling metal in her hand, asked her nicely:

"You want my caps El? Here, take them, no problem!"

She then proceeded to take El`s hand to raise it to her forehead. How did her gun get there? It fired, splattering the wall behind October with her brain, which didn't stop her from smiling.

"El?" she heard someone call behind her.

She knew this voice...

"Nate?" she turned around and saw the face of her husband. His rough features, only softened by his fleshy lips, his green eyes so full of sadness... "Oh Nate, it's you! I missed you so much!"

"No, you're not my wife!" he shouted when he saw her face.

"But... Nate, it's me, it's El..."

"Who are you? What did you do to Shaun?!"

"Mon amour, je suis en train de le chercher... I swear to you! I'm going to find him..."

"Liar! You abandoned him! You let him die! Liar! Murderer! Liar!"

"Liar!" repeated one of the women in the room.

"Murderer!"

"Liar!"

El fell on her knees and covered her ears with her hands, but she was unable to make the sound stop. She closed her eyes, but she was still seeing the horribly disfigured ghosts getting closer to her.

When they all jumped on her, she screamed.

"Nooooo!"

Panting, sweat dripping in her back, she straightened herself in her bed. Awaken by her scream, Dogmeat yelped, before sniffing her face, visibly concerned. She had found it nice to sleep next to the warm body of the dog on the way to Diamond City, and her drunken self last night had told him to come to lay at her feet. She was still feeling the fear and the misery from her nightmare... No wonder she had trouble sleeping if her dreams were like that, she thought bitterly.

The details of her nightmare were already fading, but she knew what she had just seen. All the people you meet in your dreams are people you already met in real life, right? She realized with horror that she already had lost count of how many people she'd killed in the last three months. There had been Concord, then the USAF station, then the aerodrome south of Tenplines Bluff... At least twenty... And that was not counting the one she wounded before Dogmeat or Preston ended their life.

"You were just defending your life, or making people's lives safer, okay? Those raiders... they had killed people, and they would have continued doing so... What did you want to do? Call the police, and make them go to jail?" she admonished herself.

It wouldn't have been possible, and she knew it, but not even thinking about a less deadly sentence before attacking... And to think that before everything she was against the death penalty and vigilante justice. So much more comfortable when you're not in the middle of everything, with no authority to make the decisions on your behalf. She felt guilty, but weirdly: she had the feeling that she should have been more affected by the fact she had killed so many people, and thinking about it, she was actually feeling guilty about her lack of guilty feeling.

"Great. I am definitely not overthinking everything. Now you get up, you stop trying to make knots with your brain, and you wash. You stink."

She got up from her bed and stretched a bit, shaking her head like it would make the thoughts go away, before putting her jumpsuit on to go get her bucket of water. She had a slight headache and a bit of a coated tongue, but it was _far _from her worst hangover ever. And she remembered everything that had happened last night. The disinhibition that appeared so fast had definitely been caused by her empty stomach.

"So you are awake, Deathclaw reaper!" Vadim greeted her teasingly when she came to ask him for the water. She wasn't sure she was fond of the surname. "Here, your bucket. And don't hesitate to come by tonight too... I was getting tired of the stories of Hawthorne! Good guy, but always same stories. You could tell us where you got that scar on your face."

"We'll see, Vadim, I'm not sure I can afford to do that every night..." she replied with a little smile, caressing her face with the tip of her fingers. It was so easy to forget it was there, as mirrors were much less common then, and now that she got used to the sensation of her naked skin. Vadim was definitely very friendly, beyond the fact that he was also a hard bargainer and a successful businessman. She would have thought that living in such a world would have made everyone wary of other people, but living in Diamond City probably meant that people were allowed to let their guard down.

"You're tight on money? Sometimes the shoppers at the market have some odd jobs for scavers."

"Yes, so I can come back and spend all my salary on your moonshine..." El replied with a franker smile this time.

"Whoa whoa, tovarisch, putting words in my mouth there!" he laughed. "But of course, I would understand you can't get enough of it!"

She laughed along, took the bucket, and went back to her room. When she exited it, she had all her belongings with her. Maybe she was going to come back that night, but she didn't want to pay the room if she wasn't going to sleep in it. It was 10 in the morning, way later than when she was supposed to get up, and the city was buzzing with activity.

Before heading to the detective's office, she decided to check at the market to see if she could afford a few ammo for her guns. There, she saw Piper having breakfast at Takahashi's. Apparently, she wasn't the only one who got up late.

"Hey, Piper!"

"Hey Blue! How are you? Slept well?"

The journalist didn't seem to suffer from a hangover. They chatted for a bit, making small talk about the last night. Suddenly, the journalist asked:

"Can I come along with you?"

"What? Where? Why?" El wondered with surprise.

"For a start, at Nick's office, to get his opinion on your case, and then... Maybe follow you for a bit more? I get a feeling that you are one of a kind, that you're the kind of person who attracts... interesting stuff," cautiously explained Piper.

"Interesting? You mean dangerous, right?"

"Well, in this world, interesting and dangerous often go hand in hand. And come on: you've been here for three months and you defeated a Deathclaw, joined the dying faction that is the Minutemen, traveled to look for your kidnapped son, outran a Super Mutant for almost two miles... And I think you're just getting started."

El pondered before answering. She didn't actually know Piper and although she seemed like a good person, she couldn't be sure they'd get along well. But after all, bringing her to the detective's office wasn't a huge commitment, and Piper's perspective and relations may even help her.

After checking the gunshop at the market -El was definitely too poor to afford ammunition, especially if she had to pay the detective in advance-, the two women ended up in front of Valentine's detective agency, in a narrow alley.

* * *

The cramped office was making El feel even worse. A heavy weight was crushing her chest, and she was rewinding in her mind all the things she did back at Sanctuary that could have been done later. One week... The time she took to help Marcy to transform one of the brambles-invaded backyards into an orchard for the forthcoming spring. The time Chuck, Preston, and she took to refresh her hunting skills, between actual hunting and a few shooting contests... If it wasn't for all these wasted weeks, she would have found Nick Valentine in his office, and not held hostage by some kind of mobster down in a metro station...

"I'm really sorry, Miss Eleanore. I know it may seem insensitive from me to ask for your help, but I am at loss here. Usually, Nick is the one here looking for missing people but now... he's the one who's gone missing."

El cleared her throat, trying to smile at the obviously distressed secretary in front of her. Ellie was a pretty woman, who seemed to take good care of her appearance despite her ratty skirt and tattered jean vest. She was ruffling through the papers cluttering every possible place of the office except for the ground, obviously trying to occupy her hands. Éléanore sighed, trying to not picture herself shaking the poor secretary by the collar to ask her why everything was so unfair, and to not call her Miss. Why did she feel so short-tempered?

"I'm gonna try and go get him. I know where Park Street Station is, so that's a good start. Hopefully I'll see you soon."

Ellie thanked her with so much warmth that El didn't dare to tell her that she was definitely not sure she'd be able to get anything done.

The way to Park Street Station from Diamond city was pretty straightforward: the majority of it was a street going straight to the northeast for more than a mile. If the area right around the stadium was pretty safe, Piper informed El that the city security's influence didn't spread further than two blocks away from it. As a result, the two women were walking guns in hand, trying to be discreet and staying close to the walls. Each intersection, they'd stopped and glance in the other street to check for enemies. In one street, they spotted what Piper said to be a raider camp in the distance: makeshift fences, decorated with heads on spikes and bodies suspended by butcher hooks. Tasteful. Fortunately, the raiders were too far to hear the two women and the dog and had no guards on this side of the fence.

Boston had been transformed a lot by the War and the two hundred years of neglect. The streets were littered with debris and dead leaves, with the sidewalk and the tar cracked open by persistent weeds or tree roots, often growing around the car wrecks left to rust. The two women and the dog had to sometimes step over the occasional skeleton, as it seemed that many people had died in their vehicles, blocked by some kind of traffic-jam. Most of the buildings were still standing, but it was probably thanks to them leaning on each other: El wouldn't trust most of them to support her higher than the second floor. From time to time, there were glimpses of life after the War, with boarded-up windows and reinforced doors, some makeshift cooking station on the sidewalk, or remains of protective fences. The small group passed by a yellow bus that had been converted into a shelter of some sort, with a couple of straw mats and a bunch of coolers and suitcases serving as containers. The occupants had been long gone, giving the thick coat of dust that coated everything inside. The two women didn't bother searching the place, it had been obviously emptied by its owners, or ransacked by those who killed them, who knew?

The absence of city noises was eery, almost more uncomfortable now that El was walking alongside another human. The wind howling through the crumbled down roofs and the shattered windows, shuffling the dead leaves and debris on the floor, the occasional crow flying by, the distant sound that could be a piece of a wall falling on the road or a gunshot, all of that made everything sound like a cheesy horror film. Except for the fact that, now El was living through it... It didn't sound cheesy at all. She strengthened her grip on her gun, trying to act as confident as Piper did.

The Boston Commons appeared at the end of the street they were in, and Piper caught El's sleeve to stop her.

"It's the Commons, no one goes there, it's dangerous. We'll have to get to the station by the side streets," said the journalist, making El and Dogmeat follow her in a street on the right.

"Dangerous? What's in there?"

"Nobody really knows... I've interrogated some scared to death guy who allegedly managed to escape the creature that lives here. The only survivor of his group of travelers, the corpses of his buddies must lay somewhere in this park, if not eaten by something."

"What kind of creature?"

"He couldn't tell me, he said he just ran as far and as fast as he could, and just heard roars and the shouts of his friends. It's sad, but it was on them for not taking seriously the 'Keep out, danger!' signs all over the place. It could be a good article for the journal, but there is no point in learning a great story two seconds before it kills you... I like danger, but only if I feel I can get away with it, you know?"

El couldn't disagree with that.

The blue double door closing the metro station didn't creek when El pulled it. The mobsters that supposedly occupied the place seemed to take care of their underground base. Entering the station felt odd. It used to resonate with steps from people in a hurry and rumbles from the wagons. Even the typical breeze of underground air that you could sometimes feel wasn't there anymore. The escalators were immobile, and the two women went down them crouching, trying to make as little noise as possible. They wondered for a moment if someone was even on the other side of the wall at the bottom of the escalators, before hearing a raspy voice ask for a lighter.

"Don't you think the radiation fucked you up enough?" answered another voice. "No need to continue and turn your lungs into the same shitshow as your face."

"Shut up, Dan. Your smoothskin isn't pretty enough to make us forget you look like your momma rocked you too close to the wall. Now gimme that lighter."

El wondered if it would be possible to negotiate with the gang for the release of the detective. They both sounded and looked less crazy and more organized than raiders. But before she could find a way to start a normal conversation with metro-dwelling gangsters, she heard the guy who had asked for a lighter:

"I'm gonna go out to grab a few Boston Bugles, we're almost out of toilet paper. Wanna come?"

"No thanks, I've got to finish cleaning my gun. Careful with the Commons."

"Sure sure."

Steps came closer to were Piper, Dogmeat and El were hiding, behind the doorway leading to the entrance of the station. The two women exchanged a worried look, aware that there was no way the man would go past them without seeing them. And indeed, he saw them.

"Intruder! In..."

The headshot he received from Piper's gun stop his shouting. She would probably have apologized for the blood that splattered El's face on the other side of the triggerman if his companion hadn't started to relay his warning.

So much for negotiation.


End file.
